When Vince woke up on Saturday morning, he didn’t think much of the fact that the space beside him in the bed was empty.  With eyes still shut, he stretched out his left arm and found the pillow cold and the sheets thrown back.  Emily was probably up and running errands or digging in the garden or chatting with the neighbours.

Vince drifted in and out of sleep.  He didn’t know how much time had passed before he swung himself sideways with his legs over the edge of the bed and his feet pressed to the hardwood floor.  After his morning routines — minus the shave — Vince stepped into the kitchen, wondering what he should make himself for breakfast.  That was when he had his first intimation that something was wrong.  He couldn’t say what.  Just a feeling that things were off.

He put bread in the toaster.  He set a plate on the table.  He pulled a jar of marmalade from the fridge.  He reached to the top shelf for a coffee mug.  Wait.  Now he knew why things felt off.  Emily always had the coffee maker going early on a Saturday morning.  Vince was used to waking with that wonderful pungent aroma playing in his nostrils.  But this morning the coffee maker was empty.

Vince called for Emily.  Munching on a slice of toast, he went from room to room.  He checked the back yard, then the front yard.  The car was still in the garage.  Her purse was on the low table by the front door.  Vince called Emily on her cell phone and heard a ringing from the bedroom where she had plugged it in the night before to recharge the battery. Maybe she had taken Goldie for a walk.  He called for the dog but there was no answer.  That must be it.  Emily had taken the dog for a walk.

Vince settled into his favourite chair with the morning paper and a fresh cup of coffee.  Emily would probably be back by the time he had caught up with the news of the world.  On the international front, things were as insane as ever:  desperate men launching home-made rockets and planting IED’s; gunships retaliating by slaughtering pregnant women and babes in arms.  On the local scene, banality was the order of the day:  a city councilor caught with his pants around his ankles, an auditor’s report filled with tales of waste and corruption.  As Vince was leafing through to the crossword puzzle on the back page, a small item caught his attention:  since the Vancouver Winter Olympics, there’d been an increase in Sasquatch sightings.  Vince shook his head.  What people weren’t willing to believe!

By lunch, there was still no sign of Emily and Vince was starting to worry.  He called her sister.  Maybe she’d gone over there.  He called her best friend who lived two streets over.  He went next door and asked if maybe she had dropped by for a chat.  But nobody had seen Emily.  There was a dark black feeling gathering in Vince’s gut.

After lunch, Vince phoned the police.  He didn’t know what else to do.  He sat in the living room, staring at the wedding photo on the mantel, twiddling his thumbs, standing to pace the floor, waiting for the police to arrive.  After an hour, he got tired of waiting.  He fixed himself another cup of coffee even though he knew it would only make his feelings of anxiety more acute.  As he was pouring cream into his coffee, a knock came at the door –- a firm, authoritative knock that made him leap up and splash coffee on his hand.  He answered the door while sucking a red patch of skin on his hand.  There were two of them standing there, a man and a women dressed in their night-blue uniforms, clean-edged and efficient.

The woman did all the talking:  “We had a missing persons call?”

“Mmmmph.”

“You Vincent Karsh?”

“Mmmmph.”

“Mind if we come in?”

While the woman spoke, the man looked all around the entrance way and living room.  She asked when Vince had last seen his wife.  What was her normal routine?  Had they been arguing lately?  How had they been getting along?  How was the  marriage?  Because … and she looked Vince straight in the eye as she spoke … almost all missing persons reports turn out to be domestic dispute issues.

Meanwhile, the quiet one – the man – noted the precisely arranged furniture, the well-polished hardwood floors, the careful arrangement of figurines and crystal on display in a cabinet.  Without speaking, he took the wedding photo from its place on the mantel and inspected it closely.

“You been married long?”

“Seven years.”

And the police officers looked at one another as if Vince’s answer was somehow significant.

“Is that coffee I smell?”

Vince invited the officers into the kitchen and as the woman followed him to the percolator, the man said he was going outside to poke around the yard for a minute.  The woman kept up with her questions – about Vince’s job, Emily’s job, his son off at university, money issues, pressures from in-laws, relations with neighbours, any skeletons in the closet, affairs with old flames, addictions.  All the while, she looked around the kitchen:  the spotless countertop, the wrought iron table with its sparkling glass tabletop, the hand-sewn placemats, the shelf of antique lamps, the old pine buffet.

The man came back inside:  “I see you live on a ravine lot.  Ever been broken into?”

“Once.  But that was maybe four years ago.”

“Mmm.”  And he nodded.  He raised a hand as if to show Vince something.  “I found some of these on a branch out back.”

Vince leaned in close to see what the police officer was talking about.  It was a strand of hair, thick like wire and brown.

“Emily’s hair is blond.”

By the end of the afternoon, the police officers agreed to file a missing persons report.  They went back to the station with a recent photo which they scanned and distributed online – an APB which soon became a news story, hitting the local TV news by eleven o’clock.  By seven o’clock the next morning, there was a gathering of neighbours in the Karsh’s back yard, all of them blowing on their hands and stamping their feet and downing gallons of hot coffee.  They were going to do a search of the ravine.  The police said this was premature, but when they saw how the neighbours were bent on doing their search, they brought in some experts to coordinate it.  “Might as well do it right,” they said as they let two police dogs sniff at some of Emily’s old underwear.  So, by eight in the morning, the woods behind the Karsh’s house were crackling with the sounds of radios and dogs barking and people calling out “Emily” and the crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot.

Nobody found anything until after eleven when Norm, the next door neighbour, stepped in a big plat of poop.  Nobody was sure what kind of animal would have left behind such a turd.  Some of the neighbours were experienced outdoorsmen and they said the turd was too big to have come from a deer – even a big buck.  And there was no way a farm animal like a cow could have strayed into a bush that thick.  The men stood there, staring at the big heap of shit, scratching their heads and swatting at flies, and finally confessing that they didn’t rightly know what kind of an animal would have made such a mess.  Whatever it was, they knew it was big, and so everybody should use caution.  Although everybody was thinking it, nobody asked aloud the obvious question:  could this animal – whatever it was – could it have harmed Emily?

Pushing further downstream another hundred meters, the dogs found an article of clothing.  But something was wrong.  In searches like these, what the police usually found were little scraps of cloth torn on jagged rocks or the bark of trees.  Instead what they found was an entire top, untorn, neatly folded and laid out on a log.

“Mr. Karsh,” said one of the officers from the K-9 unit.  “Can you confirm for us that this here article  of clothing belonged – er, belongs – to your wife?”

Vince’s hand trembled as he took up the top.  “I … I … Maybe … I don’t know … looks like something she’d wear.”

“But you can’t say for sure?”

“I don’t know.  I guess maybe it is.”

They followed the trail downstream.  The dogs has picked up a scent and were barking and yipping around the entrance to a big culvert that tunneled into the face of a long ridge.  It was a concrete pipe almost the height of a man and it was blocked by a gate of iron bars like the bars you’d see on a prison window.  Except that two of the bars had been pried apart to create a space that even a police officer with a Kevlar vest could have squeezed through.  There was a trickle of water coming from the culvert and draining into an algae-rimmed pool of muck.  Looking into the pipe was like looking into a cave:  it was pitch black and the air was damp and cool.  Vince shouted Emily’s name and it echoed from the darkness.  Standing in silence, the searchers shuffled their feet and tried to avoid the wet pool of muck.  Vince called again.  This time the sound that returned to them was a grunt or a low growl.

“Emily,” he shouted.

He tried to crawl between the iron bars but a police officer pulled him back.  “Let someone else go.  Someone with protective clothing.  We have no idea what we’re dealing with here.”

It was the officer who first answered Vince’s call.  He’s the one who climbed through the bars and into the culvert.  In one hand he held a flashlight; in the other, a can of pepper spray.  The commanding officer reached through the iron bars and patted him on the back, reminding him to stay in constant communication.  As the officer set off into the darkness, everyone else gathered around the entrance to the culvert to listen to the radio:

“Okay, so now I’m proceeding into the … ah, tunnel … I guess that’s what you’d call it, and, well, there’s a little water underfoot though not much and, well, a bit of a smell gets a little stronger as I move further in actually quite strong now kind of a what?  What’s it like?  Maybe a mix of BO and shit, only like it’s been multiplied or like you’ve had your head jammed up a cow’s anus.  And … what the fuck?  Holy Jesus?”

There was a roar like a lion and an ape combined.  And there was a high-pitched scream too high to have come from the police officer.  And there was the police officer, swearing and shouting.

Everyone heard a thud and the radio died.

Footsteps approached splashing through the water, kind of a limp, drag … limp, drag … The police officer came into view and threw himself at the iron bars.  He was still clutching them as he fainted.  There were three parallel gashes across his cheek, almost shredding the skin so it hung from his face.  There were similar gashes on his thigh that went clear to the bone.  Another police officer had to step through the bars to help the fallen officer out of the culvert.

The officer started awake, flailing as if he was in the middle of a fight.

“Easy there.  Easy.”  And two people held him down while a third applied pressure to his thigh.

“Oh Christ.”

“What’d you see in there?”

“Oh Christ.  It was seven feet tall.”

“Was the woman in there?”

“And covered in fur.”

“The woman.”

“And claws like razors.”

“Was Emily okay?”

“Who?”

“The woman we’ve been looking for.  Was she there?”

“Oh, yeah, sure, laid out on, like a bed of straw or hay.  She’d lost all her clothes but otherwise she looked fine.”

“Emily,” Vince yelled.
Everyone stared into the silence.

“Emily.”

There was the sound of heavy breathing, a deep resonant chest cavity, then a high-pitched:  “Why can’t you all just fuck off.”

“You recognize your wife’s voice?”

“Yeah,” said Vince.  “That’s Emily.”

The officer in charge turned and shouted into the culvert:  “Emily Karsh?”

“Fuck off.”

“Mrs. Karsh, my name is Truman Capote.  I’m –”

“I don’t care if you’re name is John Cheever.  Just leave us the fuck alone.”

“Us?  Is there more than one of you?”

“What the fuck do you think?”

“Mrs. Karsh.  We’re here to help.”

“Well I was doing just fine without you.  So fuck off.”

The commanding officer turned to Vince and asked if his wife was always so hostile.  Without closing his mouth, Vince shook his head.  Turning again to the culvert:  “Mrs. Karsh, are you hurt?”

“Do I sound hurt?  Fuck off.”

“You’re being held captive by a savage creature.”

“Fuck off.”

Officer Capote got on his radio and asked for Dr. Smitherman to be escorted to his location.  Dr. Smitherman was a psychologist.  Whenever there was a search, the police kept a grief counselor on call in case they should stumble on something unexpected like human remains.  Even though grief didn’t appear to be an issue here, Capote thought a psychologist would probably be useful.  It took a long time for Dr. Smitherman to move downstream from her trailer to the culvert’s entrance.  The problem was that she had shown up for work in heels and didn’t have time to change before going out into the field.  As she walked along the riverbed, her heels kept sinking into the mud.  By the time she arrived at the culvert, her feet were soaked and her shoes were ruined.

Officer Capote explained the situation.  After a brief chat with the husband and a reluctant look at the fallen officer’s injuries, Dr. Smitherman drew close to the bars covering the culvert.  She tried to establish her own rapport and was met by the same hostility that everyone else had witnessed.  There were guttural rumblings and high-pitched fuck-yous – the creature and the captive – the beast and the beauty.

Dr. Smitherman turned to Vince:  “Do you know what Stockholm Syndrome is?”

“You mean like what happened to Patty Hearst?”

“Exactly.  It’s where the captive starts to empathize with the captor.”

“You mean to tell me my wife has a thing for that … that … thing?”

“It’s too soon to say, but it’s a possibility.”

Vince paced in front of the culvert entrance, kicking at stones and branches, muttering under his breath, and nearly breaking his hand when he slammed his fist into a tree.  This couldn’t be possible.  He and Emily were solid.  Sure, they’d had their problems, like any other couple, but nothing serious.  Well, there was the incident with the dog.  But they had been drunk at the time.  It didn’t mean anything.  All he wanted was for Emily to come home.  He turned and gripped the iron bars.  “Emily, I love you.”

There was an angry roar that nearly knocked him off his feet, but no sound came from Emily.

The outcome of this situation has played itself out a thousand times before.  The local farmers arrive with their torches and pitchforks.  The beast may take a stand.  But we all know the beast doesn’t stand a chance.  This is a collective ritual to reaffirm the natural order of things.  The beast gets sacrificed to make this happen.  The penitent wife goes home to her husband, secretly glad to have stirred a little excitement into their otherwise dull lives, but secretly relieved because the excitement demands more energy than she can sustain.  She falls asleep in her husbands arms but her heart is somewhere else.  He tries to persuade himself that she still loves him, that the return to the natural order of things has been a perfect return.  The husband may even believe this.

To be frank, nobody cares what the husband thinks.  The end of this story illustrates why:

A second police officer went into the culvert, and when his head came rolling back to the gate, the police entered in swarms, tasers drawn, determined to bring down the beast.  A few officers sustained grave injuries, but soon the beast lay seizing in a trickle of water, shitting itself as it went down, then rolling in its own feces until at last it came to rest.  They shackled it, and while the woman lay naked on the straw and screamed in terror, they dragged the beast out into the evening light and strung it from a tree.  They called the zoo, thinking the people there might have some notion what to do with the creature, but they had to wait a long time for someone to arrive and they were still enraged that the beast had injured their friends and had even killed one of them.  So they doused its fur in gasoline and lit it on fire.  But not before they noted one remarkable feature.  As the creature hanged there upside down in the forest, everyone could see that it was endowed with a splendid penis.

While the police officers and volunteer searchers climbed out of the ravine, the beast screamed through the flames and the woman cried until she couldn’t bear it anymore, and all the men agreed that it was perfectly obvious why the woman had fled into the forest with the beast:  there was the reason, sticking straight out at them and burning orange, like a schnitzel on a bonfire.

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Sometimes Jeb takes a notion.  Been that way all his life.  Don’t matter how hare-brained or loonie-goonie, it’s his notion ‘n’ there ain’t no changing his mind.  Well this time he went too far ‘n’ it durned near kilt him.

The other day I calls him up on the phone.  I can’t remember what for.  Maybe to talk about all the construction that’s been going on.  They’ve been grading the old farmsteads ‘n’ laying out stakes to mark the streets where they’re gonna build houses ‘n’ stores ‘n’ such.  Makes an unholy racket from sunup to sundown.  So maybe that’s what I wants to talk about when I calls Jeb on the phone.

The point is:  when he finally answers, he’s pure gibberish.  All blabdy-blabdy-blab.  I haven’t got me a friggin clue what he’s tryna tell me.  My first thought is:  “My God, Jeb’s gone ‘n’ took hisself a stroke.”  I tells him not to worry, to sit hisself down on the floor if need be.  I’ll be right there.

It’s more’n two, maybe three hundred yards up to his place.  Considering the suspenders trailing ‘n’ the shirt tails flapping behind, ‘n’ considering the grubby work boots on my feet, I make the run in pretty good time.  Good fer an old geezer like me.

I bang on the door then barge right on in.  Jeb’s standing there, clean shaven, dressed fer spit.  I grab him by the shoulders, panic in my eyes ‘n’ a quaver in my voice:  “You okay, Jeb?  You okay?”

He just smiles ‘n’ says:  “Bonjour, Jed, mon ami.”

What the frig?  I haven’t heard Jeb try to parlez-vous le ding dong since we was in high school.  By my reckoning that was sixty years ago or more.  Hell, the man can barely speak English ‘n’ not half so good as me.  But there he is, being all “Bonjour, Jed, mon ami.”

I says to him:  “You must be sick.  Sicker’n I thought.”  I make him sit on the bottom step of the stairs that come down into the front hall.  “You wait here whiles I getchya some water.”  But he just ups ‘n’ follows me into the kitchen.

“Ah Jed.”  He’s got this gravelly sound to his voice ‘n’ a wistful look in his eyes, like he’s smoking Moroccan cigarettes ‘n’ staring off the Pont Neuf.  I don’t know if there’s such a thing as Moroccan cigarettes; I just figure that’s where Camels must come from.  The point is – screw the point.  I just wish Jeb would act like his old self.

“Je veux parler français – jusqu’à la mort.”

“Juice cat what?”

I have no idea what he’s tryna tell me.  Besides which I’m losin’ my patience.  This stunt of his has cost me a mighty good sweat running up the hill, huffing ‘n’ wheezing, ‘n’ my heart going like a sump pump.  I pour myself a cold glass of water.  Jeb’s ‘n’ mine’s the only homes left in the whole region that draws their water from wells.  Two hundred ‘n’ fifty feet deep.  Cold like ice.  Clear as crystal.

“Hier, j’ai lu quelque chose d’intéressant.”

“Speak English ya twit.”

But he refuses.  So we carry on our conversation in a mix of charades, twenty questions, ‘n’ a high school French that’s lain stale for sixty-five years.

“Je veux understandey what tu is tryna dites à moi,” I says to him.  “Tu ne veux pas speak the English?”

He nods.

“Ever again?”

“Oui.  C’est ça.”

“Until the day you die?”

“Jusqu’à la mort.”

“Why, pray tell, oh great ‘n’ wise nincompoop of a friend?”

Jeb steps to the kitchen table (which is French for table) where magazines, once stacked, have fallen this way ‘n’ that so’s half the friggin table is hid.  He flips through one, then another, ‘til he finds what he’s lookin’ fer ‘n’ shoves the open magazine into my hands.  It’s Psychology Tomorrow or one of them other goddam pop magazines with quick-fix answers to all life’s problems.  Jeb’s opened it to an article about – what’s it say? –  “the cognitive benefits of speaking another language.”  Well now, I’ll be the first to admit that Jeb ‘n’ me, we ain’t getting any younger, ‘n’ both of us lately, well we’ve been getting’ a little slow on the uptake when it comes to jokes ‘n’ such, ‘n’, well, we both have been losing more’n our fair share of keys ‘n’ odds ‘n’ ends.  But we both do pretty durned good for our age.  It’s one thing to say yer gonna learn another language; it’s quite another thing to say yer gonna stop using the one you was bornt with, eh?

That sends Jeb diving into all those magazines of his ‘n’ he comes up this time with an article on how the brain learns a language and how it’s important to be immersed in it proper like.

“Hell, Jeb,” I says.  “There ain’t another frenchie within a ten mile radius of this here farm.  Look it yer pond fer crissake.  There ain’t been a frog on that water fer coming on four years.  Now if that ain’t a sign, I don’t know what is.”

Jeb tells me to ne pas être such a bone tête.

Ain’t that just Jeb to go on like he’s so much better’n the rest of the world.  “Fine,” I says.  “You wanna act all hoity toity like yer some goddam frenchie, then fine, but just fer the record:  I think you’d end up learnin’ more French livin’ with Marcel Marceau than you would doin’ it this way.  I betchya don’t even last a week.”

Well, that gets Jeb all indignant.  He calls me all kinds of names like cochon ‘n’ turd d’oiseau ‘n’ bête midler.  I stomp out of his place ‘n’ back home.  I’ll be watchin’ him, that’s fer sure.  I’ll tell everyone I know and we’ll keep our eyes on him.  See how long he goes before he has to use English like a normal person.

That afternoon, I get a call from Ned at Ned’s Groceries and Fertilizer Depot.  Seems Jeb dropped by to pick up his weekly fix of ham ‘n’ cheese fer all his sandwiches ‘n’ Western omelets ‘n’ whatnot.  Walks in all snootier-than-thou ‘n’ asks fer jambon et du frommage like Ned’s gonna ever know what that’s all about.  Well, I’ve already called Ned to warn him about Jeb’s latest notion, so Ned’s prepared fer this nonsense.  Soon as Jeb asks fer his jambon et du frommage, Ned says:  “Why can’t you speak English like everybody else around here, ya goddam foreigner?”

Jeb just puts his paws over his ears and says:  “No Engleesh.  No Engleesh.  Je ne peux pas vous comprendre.”

Well that just gets Ned as riled as a porcupine in heat.  There he is, yellin’ at Jeb ‘n’ there Jeb is, yellin’ at Ned.  Wouldn’t you know it but a police officer walks into the store, some new fella Ned’s never seen before.

He says:  “Well now, what seems to be the problem?”  I mean what the hell else does police officers ever say?

Ned says:  “Officer, this man is impersonating a foreigner.”

“No law against that I s’pose.”

“Well then he’s harassing me.  Askin’ me fer stuff when I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”

“Monsieur, je m’appelle Jeb et j’ai voulu seulement –“

“Oh for crissake, it’s Jeb who lives up the road on the second concession.”

“Is that true?”

“Je veux acheter … comment dites-on en anglais … uh … how you say … ham.  Only he didn’t say “ham.”  He stuck an “eh” on the end of it so’s it come out:  “hameh.”

“Fine.  You want some hameh.  But is it true?  What he says?  ‘Bout you bein’ local ‘n’ everything?”

“No, no, no, no, no.  Je m’appelle Marcel.  Je suis … how you say en anglais … I am de twin brudder of Jeb … from France.”

“Oh fer crissake,” says Ned.

Well after the incident in Ned’s Groceries and Fertilizer Depot, word gets out that Jeb’s gone as soft in the head as ice cream in mid-July.  He goes to Lou’s diner and orders “un burger du jambon” ‘n’ the waitress can’t make out what the hell he’s askin’ fer.  ‘N’ pretty soon the cook’s out of the kitchen ‘n’ other customers are complainin’ ‘n’ there’s an unholy row that spills out onto the street.  Jeb is standing there blinkin’ in the midday sun and yellin’ about what a horrid horrid place dis is where de foreigner is treated no better den a dog.

But the worst comes later in the afternoon — à l’aprés midi as Jeb would say.  There he is, walkin’ down Main Street sayin’ “Bonjour” to everybody he knows when he takes one of those spells of his.  He’s had ’em before.  I don’t know if they’re serious or not, but they sure do look dramatic.  He clutches at his chest and stumbles around, then keels over into the flower bed out in front of the community centre.  He shouts “Mon coeur, mon Coeur!”  Then, when he’s on his back in front of the community centre:  “Oh des fleures si belles.”

Someone calls the paramedics.  There are these two hulking guys kneeling in the flowers on either side of Jeb, speaking to him in low voices ‘n’ tryna figure out what’s wrong with him.  One of them stands ‘n’ shouts to all the onlookers:  “Anyone who can translate for us?  It’s a foreigner here and he don’t speak no English.”

There’s some snickers from the crowd, but no one steps forward.  The paramedics shrug their shoulders ‘n’ cart Jeb away on a gurney.

Turns out this stunt of his nearly kills him because he don’t tell the paramedics about his heart medication – or he tells them but in that stupid French of his – so they give him something that reacts with his heart meds and sends his blood pressure into outer space.  Later in the day, I visit him in the ER where they’ve got him stuck with an IV ‘n’ hooked up to all kinds of monitors ‘n’ stuff.  I sets myself in a chair beside his bed ‘n’ he looks at me ‘n’ smiles with those faded out eyes of his.

“How ya doin’, Jeb?” I says.

He nods ‘n’ sets his hand on mine.

“You learn yerself anything from all this nonsense?”

He nods again.

“What’d you learn?”

“Oh, I dunno.”

I’m expectin’ him to say somethin’ about how it’s a dumb idea to refuse to speak the only language you know how to speak.

But he says, “No, no that’s not it.  There was something else.  I ferget.  Doesn’t matter anyways.”

That’s how it goes fer us.  Between the two of us, we should be learnin’ some pretty good lessons.  We just can’t remember them is all.

June 14, 2010

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I offer a number of options for reading it:

• a pdf document which you can load on your kindle or read on your pc with adobe acrobat reader or Skim (for Mac users)

• an epub document which you can load onto most other ebook readers or read on your pc with tools like Adobe’s Digital Editions and Sony’s Reader Library

All these reader applications are free.

If you’d rather listen to it on your iPod, download it either as an mp3 file or as a zip file which contains the mp3 file.

Enjoy!

March 11, 2010

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I was kind of hoping Lenny and Laverne would come back for this year’s party.  Until a few weeks ago, Lenny and Laverne were my next door neighbours on the cul-de-sac side of my house.  Then, without warning, they moved away.  I never did get the full story.  Even at that, I probably know more than I should.  In a bold moment, I mentioned it to Squiggy who was Lenny’s neighbour on the other side.  Squiggy was supervising the grills because he had scored a gross of ground chuck which his wife, Shirley, had hand-rolled into oversized hamburger patties.  As Squiggy slapped an oozing slab of meat onto my bun, he said, “Yeah, dunno where Lenny’d be.  But you know Lenny.  Always somethin’ eatin’ away at ‘im.”  I moved on to the condiments while Squiggy served the woman in line behind me, Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D, the women’s studies professor who hooked on weekends to pay for her quarterly junket to the Riviera.

I thought about what Squiggy said, and he was dead right.  Sometimes Lenny let things get to him in ways that were unhealthy.  I’ll never forget that evening when I stumbled on my son, James, sitting at our computer laughing away to himself.  Whenever we hear that kind of laughter, Monica and I worry that James has found a new porn site, but in this case that wasn’t it at all.  James had found www.lennyssmellymeatsite.com.  At some point, Squiggy must have done something to piss off Lenny.  According to the web site, Squiggy had the nasty habit of operating his weed whacker while under the influence (WWWI), and more than once he had inflicted life-threatening injuries on poor Lenny’s prize-winning rose bushes.  In frustration, Lenny cast about for a way to punish his next door neighbour.  The answer came to him – so the web site claimed – as he was sitting down to a 16 oz. sirloin at Smitty’s Giant Steak House.  Why not drop a raw flank steak between the slats in Squiggy’s deck, then track the steak’s decomposition online?  He could post daily updates about discolouration and maggots.  If he was lucky, he might even capture video of Squiggy standing on his deck sniffing, then calling inside to Shirley to ask if she smelled anything funny.  Lenny had posted everything online – from buying the meat, to rigging up his webcam, to the arrival of maggots.  Lenny didn’t post Squiggy’s name, but I could tell it was Squiggy’s place by the hose rack beside the deck; Squiggy always left his garden hose in a heap because he was too hammered to wind it up in a proper roll.

The next morning, I had stomped over to Lenny’s house and barged in on him while he was working his way through a big package of back bacon that he’d bought from Wal-Fart.  He asked if I wanted any, but I shook my head.  I was furious and hadn’t felt like eating any breakfast.  All I wanted to do was to say my piece.  I smile now as I think of how passionate I’d been.  I’d planted my feet on the linoleum and squared my shoulders and stared Lenny straight in the eyes and I told him I’d found his web site and I thought he was an idiot.  It was cruel to stink up Squiggy’s deck.  They were supposed to be best friends.  If they couldn’t make it work, what hope was there for the rest of us?  I remember now the look of sorrow that had passed across Lenny’s face.  He agreed that it wasn’t the most neighbourly thing he’d ever done and promised to go next door and make things right just as soon as he’d finished his sausages.

It was turning into a lovely evening.  The day had been a scorcher, but cooler air was moving through, and smoke from Squiggy’s grill was keeping the mosquitoes at a safe distance.  Monica bought a necklace from Alice Kramden’s jewelry table and the two of them were having a friendly debate about whether or not the CAS would take away your kids if you hog tied them while you took a nap in the afternoon.  Meanwhile, James and Jessica (not hog tied) were playing well past their bed time in one of those inflatable jumping castles down on the Jeffries’ front lawn.  I did my best to watch the two of them, but the women’s studies professor who hooked on weekends was quizzing me about Ricardo Pimento, who lived two doors down.  Ricardo was a hard luck case.  Just to look at them, you’d think the Pimentos had it all – new house, new car, new boobs.  You’d think Ricardo was a man at the top of his game, the pinnacle of his career, the height of success.  And yet for all the trappings, Ricardo had grown sullen.  A gloom had settled over his house.  I could be outside mowing my lawn, whistling in the sunshine, and there he’d be with his umbrella open, standing to his ankles in mud puddles.  As you’d expect in such a case, Ricardo lost most of his friends, he lost his job, and his wife started an affair with Dr. Tyson-Holyfield (the husband), the professor of social psychology who had written a book about the mating rituals of guinea fowl.  Me and some of the other boys on the block took Ricardo out for drinks and tried to talk some sense into him.  We suggested he start an affair of his own, kind of even the score.  We suggested he have an affair with Tyson-Holyfield’s wife, the women’s studies professor who hooked on weekends, but that only got him moaning worse than ever.  “How’s that supposed to even the score?” he asked.  “My wife’s gettin’ hers for free and I’d have to pay.  That make sense to you?”  The man had a point, so we all drank on in silence and Ricardo got more and more despondent.  Then, last month, he hit bottom and decided to end it all.  His wife, Olive, found him in the garage, sitting in his new car, with one end of the vacuum cleaner hose duct taped to the tail pipe and the other end stuck through the rear window.  There was a problem though:  his new car was a Toyota Prius.  The twit had tried to give himself carbon monoxide poisoning in an electric car.  He woke up to the sound of his wife screaming at him, calling him a fucking idiot, and ordering him never again to set foot in the house.  Since then, he’d been camping out in the ravine, living off the plates of leftovers that me and some of the other boys took turns setting out on our back porches.  We felt an obligation; it could’ve happened to any one of us.

Mrs. Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D, listened sympathetically as I gave her the low-down on Ricardo Pimento, though I left out the part about how me and the boys had suggested Ricardo have an affair with her.  She said she hadn’t realized how bad things had gotten for Ricardo.  I tore another chunk from my hamburger.  Damn, but this was good meat!  I held the burger high overhead with my right hand and pointed at it with my left hand and shouted to Squiggy.  But just then the speakers started blaring the purple people eater song and there was a flare from the grill, so Squiggy couldn’t hear my compliment.

I sidled up to Squiggy and helped him flip burgers and warm buns.  He held a flipper in his right hand and a Corona in his left hand.  There were two empty bottles on the ground between the grills, but he insisted that most of the beer had ended up on the burgers for extra flavour.  He wore one of those stupid chef hats flopped over one side of his head and he wore one of those stupid chef aprons draped over his neck and hanging loose down the front with stupid writing on it (“How would you like me to do your wiener?”) and an obscene drawing down around the crotch.  He opened his throat and emptied the third bottle, then asked if I’d go crack him open another cold one, which I did, which he took from me, which he held like a celebrity with a wireless mic.

By then I’d put back a couple beers too.  What with the music and the chatter and the kids laughing and screaming and crying all at once the way kids do when they’re tired, what with all that noise, my head started to spin.  I got bold:  “Uh, Squiggy, I never did hear why Lenny and Laverne sold the place.  I mean-“

Squiggy slammed down the lid of the grill and it made a sound like a shotgun in duck season.

“I know you guys had a falling out …”  Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember anything about Lenny after that chat we’d had in his kitchen.  He’d eaten the last bits of his breakfast sausage, wiped his face clean with a paper cocktail napkin, and excused himself to go next door.  That was it.  That was the last time I saw the man.

“Lenny never handled conflict well.”

“But geez, Squiggy, you kept getting drunk and weed-whacking his roses.”

“I was NEVER DRUNK.”  Still holding the Corona, he thumped a finger against my chest.  Twice.  NEVER.  DRUNK.

“Sure, Squiggy.”

“He had no right.”

“Okay.  Putting meat under your deck was immature.”

“Immature?  Immature?”  He belched.  “It was vin- vin- It was vinDICKtive.  He was a Dick.  With a capital “D” and an “ick.”  Know what I’m sayin’?”

“Sure, Squiggy, it was a dumb thing to do.  But you two go way back.”

Squiggy opened the grill again and shoveled burgers onto buns.

“So, Squiggy, why’d they sell?”

“Like I said:  Lenny never handled conflict well.”

“So you two have an argument?”

“You might say that.”

“You two have a fight?”

Squiggy tightened the grip on his Corona.  I could tell I was hitting a raw spot because the veins in his neck were bulging and his face was turning a pinky shade like the insides of a half-cooked burger.

“Geez, can’t you leave it alone?”

The way he stood there, with his Corona in one hand and flipper in the other hand, he looked like a French aristocrat preparing for a duel.  I was afraid he might parry and thrust with the flipper, then beat me over the head with the bottle.  But his demeanor suddenly changed.  The music had gotten soft – one of those Joni Mitchell songs about how she could eat a case of you – and the angry look vanished from Squiggy’s face.  In the time it takes to twist off a bottle cap, he had morphed into a blubbering drunk.  He collapsed onto the curb, fetal, arms wrapped around his legs and crying into his knees.

“I’m sorry, Lenny,” he cried.  “I didn’t mean to.”

I wasn’t sure what to do.  Part of me felt I should stay by the grill so none of the burgers got overcooked, but another part of me – okay, I admit it – I felt awkward watching a grown man cry like that.  It was unnatural.  Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D solved my dilemma.  She sat on the curb beside him, and in her own maternal whorish way, she put an arm around him and said:  “Of course you didn’t, dear.”

People were lined up waiting for the next round of burgers, and as I served them, a few nodded towards Squiggy on the curb behind me and wondered what was wrong with him.  I shrugged and smiled and mumbled something about having “a few too many” and dumped a juicy patty onto each of their buns.  After I’d doled out that round of burgers, I sat on the other side of Squiggy.  Dr. Tyson-Holyfield stood to straighten out her skirt and, stepping to the garbage can, tossed her plate along with a half-eaten burger.  Squiggy’s eyes flared and he leapt to his feet.

“What did you do?”  His nose had been running and he wiped it on his sleeve.

“Pardon me?”  You could tell that Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D was offended by Squiggy’s demanding tone.

“I said:  ‘What did you do?’”

“I’m full.  I threw out the rest of my burger.”

“Don’t you know?  There are starving people, like, everywhere.  Don’t you know?”

“Yes, of course I know.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot.”

“You were talking to me like I’m an idiot.”

“But you’re not an idiot.”

“Don’t you know?”

“About the starving people?”

“Yeah, about the starving people.”  Squiggy held the flipper high over his head.  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you?”

“I guess not.”

“See?  You see?”  Squiggy looked at me while pointing to the woman.  It was almost as if he was a teacher.  He was treating me like his pupil, and using the professor as his object lesson.  “That’s just the problem with parents these days.  Never teaching their kids the important stuff.”  And looking again at Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D:  “So your mother never told you to eat everything on your plate?”

The woman shook her head.  From the look in her eyes, it was hard to tell whether she was angry or afraid.

“You mean she never said:  ‘Squiggy, you eat up all your food; there are starving people in Africa, you know’?”  He stopped to see if she would say anything, but she just stood there glaring at him.  “Huh.  And there you go, throwing out a perfectly good burger.  You fucking bitch.”

Squiggy lunged at the woman.  With his left arm, he pinned her against the inside of his thigh and with his right arm, he brought down the flipper:  three sound thwacks to her bottom.  “NEVER.  WASTE.  MEAT.”  Before he could land a fourth stroke, I grabbed his arm and pried the flipper from his greasy fingers.  I can’t be sure, but with skirts wrenched one way and another, I’m almost prepared to swear under oath that the professor was wearing a merry widow underneath.

We were lucky.  Most of the action happened behind the grills and an empty porto-potti, so hardly anybody witnessed the scene.  I shooed Squiggy up the hill to his house and told him to cool off.  I was stunned at how calm Dr. Tyson-Holyfield, Ph.D was.  She straightened her skirt and fixed her hair and mumbled something about how most men had to pay for that privilege.

As for me, I threw the last of the meat on the grill and found myself thinking what a shame it was that Lenny and Laverne couldn’t make it to our barbeque.  These were the best damn burgers we’d ever had.

July 29, 2009

Related posts:

1. Metro Police, PCU

If you want to learn more about the FCC, read below, otherwise, click the thingy and enjoy, though I have to warn you that the story’s use of expletives is more than just fleeting.

Background: just last week the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the FCC could fine broadcasters for “fleeting expletives” or isolated cases of profanity. Read about it here. This arose from incidents involving Cher in 2002 and Nicole Ritchie in 2003 when the FCC reprimanded Fox TV. The USSC did not decide the more far-reaching question of whether the FCC regulations violate the First Amendment of the US constitution.

Justice Antonin Scalia demonstrates that he does not understand the nature of language and meaning when he writes: “Even when used as an expletive, the F-word’s power to insult and offend derives from its sexual meaning.”

When I was seven, I told my teacher to fuck off. I had no idea that the word “fuck” had a sexual meaning. I had no idea it had a meaning at all. I said it on a dare. Of course I got in trouble, but it was clear that the sexual meaning of the utterance did not come from the person doing the uttering, but from the person doing the listening. My teacher was conditioned to hear the word “fuck” as sexual. As the listener, she was responsible for importing into the incident its sexual meaning.

As a seven year old, all teachers seemed infinitely old to me, but in retrospect, I realize that Miss Fozard couldn’t have been more than twenty. It was 1970 and, at that time, teachers could go straight into teacher’s college from high school. There she was, an attractive young twenty year old, standing in front of her first batch of students, nervous, maybe a virgin, and right off the bat some smart-mouthed seven year old tells her to fuck off. Immediately, she sat me down and asked if I knew what it meant. I shrugged and said no. But again, in retrospect, I realize that I did know what it meant. Although I didn’t know it’s sexual pedigree, I knew its meaning in the context of a larger social gambit. As a student with a nervous teacher, it was my duty to challenge boundaries and ensure that authority not get too authoritarian. That was its meaning.

No, Mr. Scalia, “fuck” does not have a sexual meaning. Like all words, it has many meanings. Your decision to restrict its meaning to a blunt sexual act tells us much about your assumptions, but tells us nothing about the intentions of Cher and Nicole Ritchie, and demonstrates an ignorance of the social context in which their utterances occurred.

In the spirit of that boy nearly forty years ago, I offer up another challenge to the authorities without authority. See my podcast on lifeinthemargins.com. There, I imagine an early morning visit from the FCC. They have been alerted to my use of the word “fuck” on my podcast and want to put an end to it. However, that proves difficult. Enjoy.

No related posts.

As Brutus was finishing his second whiz, Mrs. Karsh rounded the corner in her power-walking, hip-swiveling strut, while Goldie, her half blind retriever, drew out the retractable lead to its full twenty-five feet.  Ah … the resplendent Mrs. Karsh.  Our paths often cross as we take our dogs for their morning strolls.  She has a perfect hour glass figure, full firm breasts, and a perpetually burnished skin, the sort of skin you can only get from a basement tanning bed.  I give her ten years to her first round of chemo, but in the meantime, she’s a pleasure to behold.

Yes, I confess I have a wandering eye, and Monica knows it.  There are times when she challenges me, says that thinking about it is no different than doing it.  I challenge her right back and ask where the hell she ever got such a crazy idea.  She says it’s in the Bible, which I guess is true, but that’s no excuse.  What the hell good does it do to make us feel guilty about the things we do when it’s in our nature to do them?  We might as well tell zookeepers to put down tigers because they eat meat.  There are certain animal impulses at the core of our being and that’s the end of it.  The fact is:  I’m happy being married to Monica.  We have a fine life here with our home and our two children and our dog named Brutus.  Besides which, things in the bedroom are pretty spicy if you know what I mean.  And as lovely as Mrs. Karsh might seem when she’s wiggling and bouncing her way towards me, the instant she opens her mouth, it spoils the effect.  The woman’s voice sounds like her name:  Karsh, a shrill nasal screech, sucked way back into her head like a duck quacking in an echo chamber while an eagle tears it to shreds.  I could stumble upon her reclined on a mound of cushions dressed in a diaphanous nightie surrounded by scented candles bathed in soft music and all it would take is a single syllable from her lips.  The effect would be instantaneous.  A cold shower wouldn’t have half the shrivel quotient.  I’d shrink to the size of a cold noodle.  Quite apart from the tone of her voice, there’s the quality of the content – yokel gossip that she tries to pass off as urbane chatter.  It’s always speculative and specious, wondering what the neighbours are doing, then drawing conclusions even though she has no more grasp of the facts than her dog.

While Goldie and Brutus sniffed each other up the anus like a sixty-nine on a carousel, Mrs. Karsh yakked about the neighbours three doors down, how they were going on a trip to Cozumel even though he had just been laid off and she was supporting a sister in London who was … well … you know (and she twirled a finger around her temple), not all there, plus they had a son, Jeffrey, who was about to leave for university, going through for computer science or urban geography or something like that.  She was yakking about all this, and I was trying my best not to wince, when Grayson pulled up in a new BMW, pulled up right beside the two of us, pulled up close to the curb but facing the wrong way around like he was a rebel or a teenager.  As Grayson climbed out and stepped just shy of an ancient turd that Brutus had laid on the lawn weeks ago, Mrs. Karsh stepped backwards, taking her leave, saying she and Goldie had a schedule to keep, but she never withdrew beyond earshot, hoping to mine enough nuggets to fuel her next conversation.

Grayson said he’d brought Helga.  He stepped to the passenger side and, with a gallant flourish, pulled open the door to a dark-haired woman who eased her way out of the car.  Grayson spoke as if I should know all about Helga, but until that minute, I had never gotten the faintest whiff of her existence.  The woman stepped up onto the curb and smiled and offered a hand.  She was a squat Filipino, young, but not so young she couldn’t be a mother with five or ten kids.  Her hair was dark, of course, and she wore it long, and she had the habit of cocking her head to one side so the hair fell across one of her eyes.

“This is Helga,” Grayson said.

“Oh.”

From the terse response and what was probably a puzzled expression, Grayon saw that I had no idea who Helga was.  “Irene said you’d be expecting her.”

I shrugged.

“Maybe she only spoke to Monica.”

I motioned them to follow me across the front lawn.  Monica was in the kitchen cleaning the cappuccino machine and if they were lucky, she might be done enough they could each have one.

“Helga’s our nanny,” Grayson explained.  “I thought you’d know.”

I shook my head.

“Well, our kids are older now and don’t really need a nanny any more, but Helga’s been such a good worker.  You know how it is.  We don’t wanna just throw her out, two weeks’ notice, so long, good luck, piss off.  Seems kinda harsh.  We were hoping we could find a good employer for her.  I guess it came up in conversation between Irene and Monica and, well, here we are.”

It took me off my guard because Monica and I had never talked about getting a nanny for the children.  It seemed too Peter Pannish or Mary Poppinsy.  But lots of other neighbours had a nanny.  Monica had exhausted her parental leave and so we’d have to think of something to do with the children.
Helga seemed nice enough, and when we brought the children into the kitchen where she was sitting with her cappuccino, they took to her right away.  She had a magnetic appeal that drew the two of them straight into her arms.

Later in the evening, after we’d tucked the children into their beds and sang them good-night songs, we talked about it.  Reviewing our finances, it seemed we had enough money for a nanny.  We had the space, too, with a guest room on the main floor that would do nicely for her apartment.  There wasn’t a bathroom on the main floor, but we could install one.  We’d been planning to do a bathroom addition for a couple years anyways and this would give us just the push we needed to get the job done.  In the meantime, Helga could use the upstairs bathroom with everyone else.  It would be great!  It would save us time since we wouldn’t need to make a twice daily run to the daycare centre.  When the kids were napping, she could do some cleaning, maybe even some laundry.  Those were reasons that appealed to Monica, and I nodded.  Secretly, though, I found another reason to hire a nanny:  I could rub Mrs. Karsh’s nose in it; she was always holding herself out as oh-so superior in her ways and manners and whenever we met on our dog walks, she managed one way or another to remind me that the Karsh’s had a nanny and the Hamblyn’s didn’t.  It would give me boundless satisfaction to tell her that we did, in fact, have a nanny, and not from an agency either.  A personal recommendation.”

The only thing that remained was the paperwork, which turned out to be more complicated than I had expected.  In the first place, Helga was Filipino and not a landed immigrant.  The only way she could stay in the country was on a work visa, and if she was losing her job with Grayson and Irene, then I had to go down to the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration to fill out forms and swear affidavits assuring the powers that be that we would guarantee Helga’s employment, otherwise they’d put her on a slow boat to Manila and that would be the end of it.  In the second place, Monica and I had to register as employers so we could do source deductions and remittances to the government.  Calculating taxes taxed my brain.  Fortunately Monica has a head for numbers and she kept everything straight on fancy schmancy spreadsheets she kept at work.

After two weeks, Helga was living in the downstairs guest room and we were having discussions with an interior designer about the new bathroom.  Monica had clear ideas about what she didn’t want, but not so clear ideas about what she did want.  That meant the renovations went slowly.  Drawings went back and forth and back again.  Paint chips became the subject of heated discussions at the dinner table.  Monica was forever emailing links to web sites showing bright photos of fluffy towels and brushed nickel taps and gleaming white toilet bowls.  Contractors dropped by in the early evening with heavy metal tape measures clipped to their belts, tapping walls and rubbing chins, then scribbling quotes on the back of grimy business cards.

Meanwhile, we told Helga that she was to use our bathroom upstairs.  After all, she was now part of the family and should feel free to come and go as she pleased.  We didn’t want to be rich white asshole employers like some of the neighbours we’d heard about who forced their nannies to double up as unpaid baby sitters on the weekend, or made them buy their own food and cook it on a hotplate, or made them sleep in an unheated garret above the garage.  Helga was a serious woman who didn’t show much emotion and kept to herself, but she worked hard; and if the children didn’t warm up to her in a fuzzy cuddly way, at least they respected her and did as they were told.

Helga woke up every day at five o’clock and had the kitchen ready for breakfast.  We didn’t need an alarm clock anymore.  We woke up to the sound of pots and pans clattering in the kitchen, then the pop and sizzle of bacon grease; there was the smell of the bacon mixed with eggs and toast rising up the stairwell and under our bedroom door.  We’d go to the bathroom, then and throw on our housecoats and trundle downstairs where we’d find Helga already feeding the children.  It was such a pleasure – and such a change from the frantic scramble that had typified our lives.  After we had left for work, Helga would clean up the kitchen while the children played, then she’d take them out in the stroller for a long walk with Brutus.

After a couple months, we found ourselves settling into a pleasant routine.  The children seemed happy.  Helga had made the guest room her own.  And we had found a contractor to do the new bathroom for us.  It was about then that I had my first intimation that something might be a little off.  Late one evening, as we were getting ready for bed, Monica raised a new issue:  “Have you noticed about Helga?”

“Noticed what?”

“I’ve been keeping track.”

“She’s not stealing, is she?”

“No.  Nothing like that.”  Monica had pulled on a flannel nightgown.  It was officially autumn now and nights were getting colder.  “I’ve been tracking her bathroom usage.”

“Is she using too much toilet paper?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”  Monica started to brush her hair at the night table.  “The opposite in fact.”

“She’s not using enough toilet paper?  I don’t think we’re supposed to get that involved in her life.”

“No.  What I’m trying to say is:  I don’t think she’s using the bathroom.”

“Well then where the hell is she doing her business?”

James had come to Monica earlier in the evening, curled up in her lap for a bedtime story, and when the story was done, he leaned in close to Monica’s ear and whispered that he had a secret.  He was awkward and halting, and even when Monica coaxed him to speak, she couldn’t understand half of what he said.  It was something to do with Helga.  James had seen her do something, but he didn’t want to say what.  It was almost as if he felt guilty, as if sharing his secret was an act of betrayal.  It had happened in the kitchen.  That’s where he’d seen it.  He was supposed to be in his room having his afternoon nap, but he was a big boy now – almost four years old – and didn’t feel like taking naps much anymore.  Most of the time now, he just lay there with his eyes open, looking around the room and having conversations with all the things he saw.  He’d gotten out of bed and padded downstairs, walking on tiptoe in sock feet, gliding across the smooth tiles without making a sound.  He’d walked into the kitchen and found Helga standing on a chair with her jeans around her ankles.  In fact, she wasn’t standing.  James had demonstrated to his mother how he had found Helga when he stepped into the kitchen that afternoon.  It was more of a squat so that she hovered above the kitchen sink.

As we settled onto the bed, Monica said:  “Alan, our nanny is using our kitchen sink for a toilet.”

“Oh, come on.  You’re not going to believe that from James, are you?  He’s only three.  He still has imaginary friends.  And you couldn’t understand most of what he was saying anyways.”

“I think you should confront her.”

“What?”

“Point blank.  Just ask her.  Have you been using the kitchen sink to uh … you know?”

“I’m not going to do that.”

It’s one thing to say you’re not going to do something, but quite another thing to actually go ahead and not do it.  I’ve often found that when dealing with Monica.  She has this stern way of looking at me and there’s always the implied threat of withholding:  if I’m going to not do something, then she’s going to not do something too.  It was an impossible situation, so I relented and promised to confront Helga the following evening as soon as I got home from work.

It turns out that confronting somebody about her habits of elimination is harder than it sounds.  I think she was too embarrassed to talk to us about how awkward she felt climbing the stairs to our sleeping quarters just so she could perform a commonplace bodily function.  And, for my part, I think I was too embarrassed to ask her about it.  I stood in the kitchen doorway, watching as she fed Jessica spoonfuls of a yellow-green mush, and hoping for an opening.  Helga made cooing sounds and smiling baby talk, and even mimicked an airplane as she dropped her payload on Jessica’s tongue.

“Helga?”

She looked up at me from her crouched position by the high chair.

“Helga, I was wondering if I could have a word with you.”

She stood.  There was a worried expression on her face.  I cleared my throat and hemmed and hawed and made a few incoherent comments about how the children seemed to have taken to her.  As I stumbled along, I saw how her expression shifted from worry to fear.  Shit!  That’s not what I wanted.  I trashed my planned talk and, instead, told her how pleased we were and wanted her to know that if there were any concerns – anything at all – she should feel free to come speak to either one of us.  Helga nodded – yes, yes – then crouched again and shoveled another spoonful of mush into Jessica’s mouth.

It was the weekend, so I took Brutus for a walk and let Helga go off with her nanny friends to whatever place nannies go when they’re not tending to children and walking dogs.  Brutus followed the same routine as always (what other kind is there?), peeing on the granite boulder on the east side of the lot, then drifting to the west side of the lot and peeing on the pole that holds up the basketball hoop.  He’d already killed most of the grass around the base of the pole, but I don’t suppose that matters; no amount of grass is going to hide the fact that a basketball hoop on the lawn by a driveway is an act of aesthetic sabotage.  The smell of piss gives it credibility.  Just as the last dribble fell to the grass, the redoubtable Mrs. Karsh swept into view.  I tried to pretend I hadn’t noticed her, but our eyes had already met, so it was too late.  I eased Brutus to the end of the driveway and waited for Mrs. Karsh to wiggle and bounce her way up to us.

“I need to have a word with you.”  She spoke in a loud nasal voice that people could hear from one end of the street to the other.

Brutus and Goldie did their usual dance, sniffing each other up the ass and getting their leashes tied in a knot.  Once we had them untangled, Goldie crumpled in a heap on the grass not far from the pole and the puddle of piss.

“I hafta tell you,” she said.  She assumed an officious manner which reminded me of a civil servant behind a counter or a nurse at a walk-in clinic.  “The other day – was it Tuesday or Wednesday? – I forget – been meaning to tell you – I saw something.  I thought you should know.  Something of concern.  I was in the park with Goldie.  You know the one?  Hedgerow Place?  Near the community centre?  So I was in the park with Goldie.  You know how they have that stand of trees in the middle with all the bushes and overgrown weeds?  You know the clump I’m talkin’ about?  The one the kids like to play hide and seek in?  Yeah, you know the one I’m talkin’ about.  Well on Tuesday or Wednesday Goldie and I were walking there between the clump of trees and all those swing sets, and I look over and there, in the bushes so you could hardly see, there was your nanny.  Whatsername?  Olga?”

“Helga.”

“Helga.  Yeah, Helga.  There she is in the bushes with her pants down, squatting against a tree.”

It was hard to know how to read Mrs. Karsh.  She behaved like all she wanted was to help, but I knew her better than that and suspected that she was secretly gloating.  We hadn’t used an agency, so we were getting what we deserved.  “Huh!” I said, pretending that nannies pee in bushes all the time.  “Wonder why she’d do that?”

“She’s a pervert.  That’s why.”

“Well … let’s not jump to conclusions.”

“Pardon me?”  Her righteousness made me feel feeble.  “I thought your children would come first.”

“Yes, of course.”

“You should fire her.”

I think, in her mind, I was keeping a house for degenerates, a safe haven for deviant foreigners, and if I didn’t act in a decisive and immediate way, then I was as much a degenerate as my nanny.  I could be wrong; Mrs. Karsh could have been thinking about the weather.  But that was the impression I got as I watched Goldie sniff at the piss on the grass, then raise a hind leg and lick his own penis.

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1. Letter From Nigeria

So ya, man.  Name?  Hughes.  Ya.  Ted.  So ya, man, I worked on the GB20 design team.  You owe me.  You owe me big time.  In fact, you guys should be on your knees kissing the ground we walk on.  We hit a veracity factor – nine point seven – unheard of.  Most people – even the pros – most of them couldn’t tell the difference.  The new bot could lie, it could laugh at a private joke, break out in a sweat under pressure.  We made a bot with Asperger’s Syndrome, another one with social anxiety disorder that would fall down and have a panic attack.  We even did a bot that would tic under stress.  Annoying as all hell, but that’s what the loved one wanted.

Sorry.  What?  I’m talking too fast?  Whatcha watchin’?  Some video of me.  Oh, you’re doing a voice calibration.  How do I sound?  You know, it might be easier if you filtered the audio.  There’s a lot of ambient noise in that clip.  I once had a client – widow of a NASCAR driver who’d been killed in a pile-up.

Interruptive speech pattern?  Ya.  Didn’t they tell you?  I’m ADHD.  When I was a kid, my mother used to –
The NASCAR driver?  Oh ya, sorry.  In the beta version of his griefbot, they forgot to filter the audio when they were seeding the voice module – they used sampled sounds back then instead of independent voice generators.  Problem was:  all our sampled clips came from interviews he’d given to the sports networks or clips from his pit crew.  All of it was from the race track, so it had the sound of cars in the background.  No matter what he said, you could hear it there just on the threshold.

When we did the beta testing, we used the Romantic Dinner B scenario – no, no – the one with the candles – the violinist? – ya – and the guy who comes to the table with roses.  So we invite the widow in for a test drive and there she is, sitting across from her griefbot, holding its hand, looking first into the candlelight, then into its optics.  Then it tells her how beautiful she looks.  Well she just about cancelled the contract on the spot.  She had pretty good hearing and when it spoke, she could pick up the ambient engine sounds underneath the words.

Ya.  Ya.  I was there from the beginning, back when Microserf was diversifying and ended up in the funeral business.  For a while, our product was too good.  Our veracity factor got so high we were freaking out some of the love ones.  Either that or sometimes it kept them from grieving properly.  There was one time we got sued for misrepresentation because our product was so realistic that the loved one didn’t want to believe the deceased was really gone.  Can’t call it a griefbot if keeps the client from grieving.  Kind of undermines the whole project.  You’ve been in the business a while, so you know how it is.

After that, we lowered the veracity factor on purpose.  Kept it hovering around nine point five.  Made the hair a little too coarse.  Didn’t apply the final softening agent to the epidermis; that way, under full light, the griefbots had a kind of plasticky sheen to them.  By skimping on a few of the finishing touches, the loved ones would never be under any illusions.  They’d get all the comfort of a full-featured griefbot without the problem of denial.  Plus we added another precaution:  at appropriate intervals, the griefbot was programmed to remind the loved one that it was only a machine – a complex and intelligent machine – but a machine just the same.

Me?  I was in calibration too.  Just like you.  Only I handled cognition.  I was a coordinator, so I drew together all the programming for movement, speech, auditory and written comprehension, spatial-temporal perception, emotion simulation, self-awareness, the whole bucket of bolts.  It was something to be proud of, all that pioneering work I was involved with.

Mind passing me that glass of water there?  Flapping the mouth like this makes a guy thirsty.  You like that, eh?  We were the one’s developed that idea.  It’s called the human response factor (HRF).  Do they still call it that?  Or is it like everything else nowadays – changing its name every other year so people will want to buy the latest even though it’s no different than what they were selling a decade ago?  Ah geez but I’m showing my age.

You’ve got what?  A beta test to do?  Which one?  Ah … Romantic Dinner C.  Dinner served in a hotel suite and a segue to sex.  That’s just what you’d expect from Sylvia.  For her, it was never about the sex – more about the physicality of it all.  She was a real touchy-feely kind of woman.  Me?  I was more of a talker.
You do?  You mean it’s set up right now?  Lead the way.  Hey, you’ve really got things done up nice.  A lot nicer than when I was working here.  In through those doors?  She’s waiting for me just through those doors?  Okay.  Guess I’ll see you for the debriefing.  Dinner and sex?  Debriefing?  Get it?  Geez.  I see they aren’t hiring for sense of humour.

Sylvia!

You look lovely tonight.

It’s me – Ted – and I’m still dead.  Don’t, Sylvia.  Ah, geez.  Don’t get angry.  Of course I’m still an idiot.  I was programmed for insensitivity.  Please don’t throw the dinner rolls at me.  Why?  Why?  Because if they didn’t program for insensitivity, it wouldn’t be me, now would it?  No.  Not the wine.  Don’t throw wine in my face.  I’m a beta version.  They haven’t put the sealant on yet.  I might short out.  Ah, geez.  You never listen.  You just never – Don’t!  Don’t storm out!  It’s me should be angry at you.  Sit down!  Don’t!  Don’t!  Ah, geez.  There she goes.  Just like old times.

So now what do I do?  Alan?  You there?  Alan?  There’s a steak getting cold here.  May as well have yourself a good meal while we do our debriefing.  Whaddya mean I should wait and see what happens?  You think this’ll turn into a makeup sex scenario.  Oh really?  Well I’ve got some news for you that may come as a surprise.  I’ve been running my internal diagnostics while I’m sitting here and guess what?  Somebody forgot to initialize the sexual response.  That’s right.  I’m impotent!  Sylvia and me, we couldn’t have makeup sex tonight if we wanted to.

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I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, you know.  There was j.d., too, the bi-polar chick from two rooms down who got admitted by her boyfriend because she thought she belonged on “Dancing With The Stars” and so stayed outside dancing all night every night hoping aliens would be so enthralled by her moves they’d whisk her up and away into the night sky.  (Nobody told her the show title wasn’t literal.)  She had the same sense of Dr. M., though I didn’t need her opinion to back me up; all I had to do was compare the way j.d. looked from one session to the next.  Every day she left his office looking a little more flat, with eyes a little more sunken, dark circles underneath, back stooped, folding in on herself like a doll that’s lost all its stuffing and has nothing left inside to support itself.  She’d flop like a Raggedy Anne over a chair then bitch about how she couldn’t smoke in her own room and how the food tastes like mud with little chunks of dog turd stirred in to add spice and how her sessions with Dr. M. were making her feel worse instead of better.  We’d walk together up and down the hallways of the ward, though walk may be an exaggeration, more like a shuffle, the kind of back and forth you’d expect from a couple of sleepwalkers.  And we’d talk as we went, though talk may be an exaggeration too, more like a grunt or a nod, the kind of slo-mo jibber jabber you’d expect from people halfway to the funeral parlour.

The next day j.d. was gone – no good-bye – no nothing.  I asked at the nursing station where she’d gone, but it was a new girl on duty and she looked at me like I had rocks in my head, or nothing there at all, and shrugged and said she’d never heard of anybody name j.d.

“The girl in room 1313,” I shouted.

The nurse didn’t have a clue.  There was no file out for a j.d.  It’s like she never existed.  The nurse said housekeeping was cleaning things up in 1313 to make space for a woman who tried to kill herself by swallowing a pound of table salt.  “You’d be amazed how much damage a pound of table salt can do,” she said.  “Sucks the life right outta you.”

I shuffled my way down to room 1313 to see for myself, moping along, head bowed, muttering absently as I went.  I hovered near the entrance to the room while the woman from housekeeping – a stout girl with big hips – breezed around the room singing a song and waving her duster like it was a magic wand and she was the housekeeping fairy.  She had a big metal cart with separate places to stuff dirty laundry and garbage, and underneath was a stash of cleaning products.  I was standing just outside the room when she left, pushing the cart in front of her as she moved on to room 1315 where John the wolf man slept.  John wasn’t really a wolf man; he had a schizoid personality disorder and liked to howl at the moon and lick his own genitals.  Everybody admired his flexibility but wanted to help him channel it into something more sanitary like yoga.  As the housekeeper trundled by me in her cloud of antiseptic smells, I glimpsed the bed sheets stuffed into the receptacle and noticed a large red stain, still wet and glistening beneath the fluorescent lights.  Was it juice?  Or nail polish?  Or blood?

My brain went wild with speculations, like piranhas around a floating carcass.  Dr. M.’s been after me about that one – the habit of catastrophizing is what he calls it – where I take some insignificant event in my life and then explode it into an apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario, or take something random and interpret it as if it carries special meaning – like when I sometimes see a look in somebody’s eye and start to wonder what it was for.  Was it a look of disgust or annoyance?  Did I do something to deserve the look?  Was there something I did by accident that ended up offending them?  Will they ever speak to me again?  Will I be able to keep them from suing me?  Afterward, when I sort it all out, I discover that they had a speck of dust in their eye, and far from giving me a look, didn’t even know I was there.  But this was different.  There was most definitely a red stain on the sheet and I was pretty certain it was a clue something bad had happened to j.d.  There was nothing for me to do but to follow the housekeeping fairy around and look for a chance to steal the stained bed sheet from her cart when she wasn’t looking.  I’d need it as evidence.

My chance didn’t come right away because John the wolf man’s room was too close to the nursing station where the new girl sat and watched every move I made.  I had to wait until the housekeeper was around the other side of the nursing station and half way down the far hall before I made my move.  She had parked her cart outside the room of Alison Spendalotte, a bipolar mother of seven who had maxed out her credit cards trying to buy mosquito netting for every child in the world.  When the housekeeper went into the bathroom to scrub the toilet, I reached in for the stained sheet, but it was gone.  Nothing.  Just pillow cases and towels.  With all the sheets missing, there must’ve been a cover up somewhere.

Later in the afternoon I met with Dr. M.  He stood tall behind his desk and motioned me to enter and take a chair.  The pale complexion, the dark hair, the ruddy cheeks and lips, all of it had a disturbing effect on my imagination.  Notwithstanding the warning sirens that went off inside my head, I found myself sharing with him my concerns, but more in a general way.  I said how I was going to miss j.d. because we’d gotten along well together, and how it bothered me that she left without saying good-bye, but I held back when it came to the more suspicious things I’d seen, what with the housekeeping lady and the bloodied sheet and the new nurse who’d never heard of j.d.  After all, I didn’t want Dr. M. to think I was paranoid or anything, since that wasn’t what I was in for.  Even so, Dr. M. screwed up his face in a cloudy look that made me feel uncomfortable, and he asked who I was talking about.

“j.d.,” I said.

“Who’s j.d.?” he said.

“You know.  The girl in 1313.”

“Right.  Right.”  And he started scribbling a torrent in his little notebook.

Along one of the walls is a couch, more like one of those low tables that physiotherapists use – only cushier.  Dr. M. had me stretch out on the couch with my back pressed to the cold vinyl and my gut exposed to the tiled ceiling.  He said he wanted to hypnotize me.  I was worried about what I’d say to him while I was under.  I didn’t want Dr. M. to know what I was really thinking, especially about the housekeeper with that satisfied smile of hers and those well-fed hips that went wobble wobble behind her cart.  But I couldn’t come up with a good excuse not to go under, so found myself drifting off to the mellifluous tone of Dr. M.’s voice as it described a sandy beach with water licking my toes and a breeze whispering through my hair.

Of course I can’t remember what I said or where I went while I was hypnotized.  That’s part of the deal.  I woke up to the sound of Dr. M. clapping his hand.  As I swung around to sit upright, I asked if he’d gotten anything out of me, but he only smiled and nodded and kept his mouth shut.  Then something strange happened.  He kind of coughed on something – maybe choked a bit or puked inside his mouth.  There was a chuff chuff sound that he muffled by whipping out a white handkerchief and clamping it over his mouth.  When he drew the handkerchief away from his mouth, I saw that his lips were ruddy and bright – too ruddy, too bright.  He crumpled the handkerchief into a ball and threw it to one side of his desk and there, in amongst the folds of the white cloth, I thought I could see spatters of red.  I thought it meant something, like a clue in a mystery novel.  All I had to do was stick it together with all the other clues and they would coalesce into some overarching explanation, but I was feeling light-headed and nothing came to mind.

By then the session was over and it was time for me to go back to my room.  As I shuffled down the hall, I could feel it in my back, that feeling like a thousand pounds of rocks was bearing down on me, bending me over, stooping me low, grinding me down.  And there was another feeling too, a feeling in my face, like all the skin was drooping off my cheek bones and sagging into bulldog jowls.  It seemed to take the rest of the afternoon for me to make it to my room, that’s how slow everything was moving, and when the new nurse waved from the nursing station and said hi, all I could manage in return was a guttural grunt, like a sleepwalking pig.  That was when I realized they’d finally gotten to me.  Soon I’d be like all the rest of them:  wandering around in a fog, one foot in front of the other, moaning and groaning under my breath, not caring whether I was living or dead.

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It was all a set-up of course.  Anybody could see it.  The judge was as much a part of the system as the rest of them.  There were the cops who arrested me.  There was the clerk who processed me when I went to the holding cell.  There was the Justice of the Peace who set my bail.  There was the Legal Aid clerk who handled my application for counsel.  She was like all the others – working for the government and wheedling me for more information.  And then there was my lawyer – collecting his fee from Legal Aid – in effect, working for the government too, even though he said he worked for me.  They were all in it together.  It was just a big set-up.

I got arrested for throwing egg bombs at the American consulate.  Never heard of an egg bomb?  I guess not, seeing as I invented it.  When I was a kid, my mom would sit me and my brothers down at the kitchen table to make Easter eggs and we’d start by blowing out the eggs.  That was how I’d start to make my egg bombs too.  Blow them out.  Then I’d seal up the hole in the bottom and pour in my ingredients – ammonium nitrate for one thing – and some other stuff that’s none of your business – nothing you couldn’t figure out from reading the Antichrist’s Cookbook.  Then stick in a fuse and pack twelve of them up in a carton like a real dozen eggs and stuff them in the bottom of my knap sack.

What was I protesting?  No.  No.  Not the torture of  prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.  And not war in Iraq.  It was something simpler, and personal.  The CIA had hacked into my desktop computer and commandeered my web cam to spy on me.  Even though my computer sits on the kitchen table, they were able to use my web cam to take video of me in my bedroom.  Doing things.  You know.  Things of a personal nature.  Yeah, I thought you’d ask that – how they could use a web cam to take video of something down the hall, around the corner and through another doorway.  It’s all very complicated.  Involves photon telemetry theory and light difractals.  But it’s possible.  I have file – a dossier – of all the research.  The people from Langley can do it.

Well I wasn’t going to stand for it.  The CIA was violating my right to privacy and I wanted to send a clear message to those arrogant imperialists that they weren’t ever going to subject me to the humiliation of publicly showing video of me in my bedroom … You know.  Doing what people do.  In the bedroom.

With a woman?  You think I should have a co-complainant?  A second egg-lobber?  A partner in crime?  She –

Hand job?  What?  Throwing an egg?  Oh!  Oh.  I see.  You think all they caught me doing in my bedroom was –

You don’t think they caught me doing anything?  Well now that’s just insulting.  Of course they hacked into my computer.  They leave digital traces you know.  I have the proof.  Well … I had the proof.  Except my external hard drive failed the day before yesterday, which should come as no surprise, since they probably engineered that to happen too.

So there I was down at the American consulate, lobbing my egg bombs at the windows.  Didn’t work, as you can see from the fact that I wasn’t charged with detonating dangerous explosives, only leaving a black goo running down a couple windows and pooling on the sills, and gumming up the toes of a few pigeons.  Bang!  A criminal record, and a sentence too.

When it came time to make submissions for sentencing, the lawyer did his best to present me in a good light.  He stood there in his thousand dollar suit and waved in my direction and smiled and told the judge how I’m really a nice guy, with a steady job as a clerk in a bookstore, who lives alone in a one bedroom apartment, who keeps mostly to himself and has never done anything like this before in his life.  Yup.  That’s me.  A model citizen.  Doing my best to stand up for the rights of the little guy.

When my lawyer was done talking, the judge announced that he had made up his mind.  He told me to stand up, which I did.  Then he glared down at me from that raised up desk of his and gave me a lecture about the importance of social order and respect for the law, how my intent (blowing things up) was grave and reprehensible, but my method (egg bombs) was innocuous enough that it mitigated circumstances, as did the fact that I didn’t have a criminal record, not even a parking ticket.  So the judge told me he wasn’t going to send me to prison.  Instead, I’d have to do two hundred hours of community service.  “You have a choice,” he said in that venerable voice of his.  “You can either help out in an inner-city soup kitchen, or you can read to victims of aphasia.”

“What’s aphasia?” I asked.

“How the hell should I know?  I’m just reading off a list.”

That’s how I ended up doing volunteer work at the Centre for Incurable Aphasia.  On my first day, a middle-aged social worker named Glenda gave me a tour of the place and told me all about aphasia.  She hobbled around on stumpy legs, introducing me to their in-house nurse and another social worker and some of the volunteers and a whole raft of gibbering yammering aphasics.  She explained to me that aphasia has something to do with the language centres of the brain.  Sometimes, when a person has a stroke or an accident or when a person gets Alzheimer’s disease, then they lose the ability to understand speech or read text.  Or they might lose the ability to speak coherently.  For some of them, the things they say make sense within their own little world, but make complete nonsense to the rest of us.  The other problem with aphasics is that they sometimes don’t know where they are, and even for those who do know where they are, things can sometimes get snipey.  Say you’re an aphasic and you get lost?  How are you gonna ask for directions?  And even if you do get directions, what’s to say you’ll understand them?  I could see right away that this could be a real problem.

At the end of the tour, Glenda introduced me to Robert, only she pronounced it with a funny accent, like she was ordering a bear to row a boat:  Row, bear!  She said Robert was once a priest who, in addition to speaking his native tongue (which was French) and the language that normal people speak (which is English), he had once been a scholar of dead languages like Hebrew, Greek and Latin.  Glenda sighed and raised her hands to the gods and said it was a shame to have lost all that talent.  But that’s what you get for riding a bicycle along a city street without a helmet.  I shook hands with Robert and smiled and said hi, and he took my hand and pumped it like a lumberjack yanking an axe out of a stump.  He said he was studious of my knowing and ratcheted fifty as per my domain.  I told him that it was all well and good, but I was doubtful, which seemed to make him happy because he broke out in a big grin and slapped me on the back.  Glenda was delighted and said she thought the two of us would get on famously.  So there you have it.  As punishment for throwing egg bombs at the American consulate, I had to go twice a week to the CIA and read to the priest named Robert or take him for walks around the block when the weather was good.

I had no idea what to read to Robert, so Glenda suggested that, because he was a priest, maybe I should start with the bible.  I’ve never been much of one for the bible because mostly it’s a big set of coded protocols designed to get inside your head and control your thoughts, so I had to go to the store and buy a brand new one.  Turns out the bible is pretty long, so I cheated and started in from the second part of it.  I sat myself down with Robert beside a big picture window that looked out onto the street, and there I started to read from the Gospel according to John, whoever he was:  “In the beginning was the Word.”

Well I couldn’t even get out the first sentence without realizing I was reading a load of gibberish.  Whoever heard of capitalizing something mid-sentence like that?  Big “W”.  Robert must have thought it was gibberish too because he slapped the open book on my knee and shouted:  “Log!  Log!”  At first, I didn’t know what he was getting at.  But, even though Glenda had said there was nothing of sense in his speech, I still got the feeling he was telling me something.  And sure enough, when I thought about it a little more, I knew exactly what he was saying.  The bible was made of paper.  It was, when you really think about it, a log, just like a table or a toothpick or a framing stud.  He was telling me the bible had come from a log.

Then I thought about it more closely.  Thinking closely has always been my downfall.  That’s what my mother used to tell me, and even the judge got after me for thinking myself into knots over America’s web cam hacking capabilities.  Still, I can’t help myself.  It’s part of who I am.  So I thought about how I was reading from the bible and how it seemed to me like gibberish.  But I know it isn’t gibberish.  Northrop Frye got famous for calling it the great code.  And it is.  There are all sorts of hidden messages in it.  Six six six is only the beginning.  It even predicts things like wiretapping and web cams.  It’s in there.  Just read the book of revelation.  Well then it occurs to me that maybe the same principle applies to my friend Robert.  Maybe it sounds like he’s talking gibberish, but he’s really giving us a coded message.  After all, Robert was a priest, so he’d know all about that way of communicating.  Maybe my job is just to listen a little more carefully than all the others.  Maybe Robert’s been trying to tell us things.  Maybe higher powers, like aliens or colophons, have been using Robert as a tool for communicating with us – only they’re getting frustrated because most of us are too dull to notice.

I went in twice a week to read to Robert, and sometimes, after I’d read for a bit, we’d have ourselves a walk and talk about religion or politics or national security or mind control.  I could tell by the look on his face that he enjoyed our conversations and had deep thoughts all his own.  He told me the intractability of gastro-enteritis was more necessity than a truck can hovel – which is a remarkable insight if you look at it in just the right light.  Another time he told me that clouds have the inclination of putrefaction unless the carrying agent has formidable constancy – which is absolutely true!  And I told him so.  Of course, after that remark, the gristle was improbable and so I had no choice but to bring in new reading materials.  It’s sad to see how a priest can lose his faith, especially when nobody else really understands his situation, so I took it upon myself to show him that at least one person in the world knew where he was coming from.

I started with the Antichrist’s Cookbook.  I worried that Robert might find it too controversial.  I worried that he might get whiplash going from one kind of reading to the other.  But he didn’t seem to mind.  Together, we read about how to make pipe bombs and he smiled and nodded with every new instruction.  We went on to a chapter about how to bring down even a big server farm by mounting a denial of service campaign, and that got him excited, especially the part about the host, though I got the impression he took a lot of things too literally.  Then we went on to an almost art book called Graffiti as a Record of Social Change that I’d borrowed from the library using a stolen library card (so the government couldn’t track my reading habits).  It was a coffee table style book with big glossy pictures that we pored over together and talked about.  Once, Glenda poked her head in the room and was delighted to see how animated our conversations had gotten.  I’d talk about how wrapping a nude figure around the corner of a building was a symbolic statement about the submission of the human form to the brutalizing effect of modern architecture.  And Robert would come back with an observation about the servile comeuppance of the breast in the remonstrance of the intaglio procedure.  Our chats were an inspiration, and when we were done for the day, I couldn’t wait for my next visit.

I don’t want to give the impression that it was all inspirational.  For example, there was one day when Robert had a cold and I found myself utterly disgusted by his sneezing and slobbering.  But the most difficult day – for me – came when I looked at Robert and realized how sad his life had become.  Here was a man – a priest – who had renounced the priesthood.  I know.  I know.  You could say that falling off a bicycle and getting a brain injury doesn’t exactly count as a renunciation of your vows.  But that’s just the point.  Even if it wasn’t a conscious renunciation, it could still be an unconscious renunciation.  There could have been an unconscious influence that pushed him off his bicycle.  Improbable, you say?  But consider what he said to me one sunny afternoon in the middle of July:  “The compass of our being fastens to the unsettled comforts that trivial reports to the more decided types of our mind.”  What could be clearer!  In those spare but incisive words, I knew that Robert had renounced his vows and that the CIA was conspiring with the Vatican to keep him from breaking his vow of chastity.

“Let’s go for our walk,” I said, pretending to be casual so I wouldn’t attract attention.

“The trees have garbled foil when the poetry gets depended from a blissful toque.”

“Don’t joke with me,” I told him.  “It’s pretty unequivocal.  You need to get laid, and I’m the answer to your prayers.”  I spoke that last bit in whispers because Glenda was down the hall and was probably in on the plot.

We went to the park across the road, like we usually did, but this time we went clear through the park and out the other side where we caught a cab and rode downtown.  Actually, we didn’t ride directly downtown.  We rode to the west end, got out, caught another cab, rode to the east end, got out, caught another cab, and took that cab downtown.  You can never be too careful.  It’s impossible to tell how organized they are when it comes to keeping an ex-priest from breaking his vow.

Now let’s be clear about this.  I expect when you picture Robert, you have in mind some stooped-over, grey-haired old geezer of a prune running around in a black robe with a cross dangling from his neck.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Robert was a young guy, not much older than me, with nice-looking features notwithstanding a bicycle accident that had played mush with his head.  He was slender, with an athletic build, and when we went for our walks, I had trouble keeping up with him.  If he had taken the notion, he could have torn away from me and run off in any direction he pleased, and there’d be nothing I could do to prevent him.  He was that spry.  But he never caused trouble because he was an amiable sort who loved to smile and talk and bask in the company of other people.  He had longish blond hair with just a hint of grey at the temples, and when he looked out from beneath the bangs that fell across his eyes, there was kind of a – well, I dunno – some of the lady volunteers had taken a shine to him.  So running off to get Robert a bit of action wasn’t as outlandish as it sounds.  Just wanted to clear that one up before I go any further.

We found ourselves sitting on a pair of bar stools in a dive of a pub and carrying on a conversation with a pair of lovely ladies named Cyndi and Cindy who seemed to think I was quite the radical intellectual with a friend who was quite the looker.  I smiled and raised my pint of bitters while Robert told them he was amiably recused to the disposition of offal sustenanced through our mutual commerce.  That was the first time I ever thought maybe Robert was out of his depth.  He had insisted on ordering a double of Johnny Walker Red Label, but I was beginning to think he wasn’t as experienced a drinker as he let on.  I didn’t want to be stuck in the position of having to cover for him.  If this was to be a lasting friendship, then he’d have to hold his own in situations like this.

It turns out Cyndi and Cindy had an apartment just upstairs from the bar.  I thought that was an extraordinary coincidence, but Robert just waved it off, which set me to thinking maybe this priestly friend of mine was a little more worldly than he had first let on.   We followed the two lovely ladies upstairs and found that the apartment was mostly a glorified bedroom with an extra closet and a Jacuzzi tub.  The bed was enormous.  You could have landed a commercial jet liner on it.  Just as things were starting to get interesting, there was a sharp rap on the door and loud voices sounded in the hallway.  Cyndi was wearing more clothes than the rest of us, so she answered the door.  Two police officers burst into the room, big burly guys, probably lovers (I know how these things work).  Robert was sitting naked in the middle of the bed, and though he has difficulty talking, he had no difficulty making his wants be known.

One of the police officers referred to some scribbles on an index card that he held in his right hand, then he looked around the room.  “We’re lookin’ for a guy named Robert Ludlum.  ‘Zat either of you two clowns?”

He stared into my eyes.  “’Zat you?”

I shook my head.

Then he stared at Robert.  “How ‘bout you?”

Robert made wild motions above his head while his equipment wobbled around in circles.  “Bazookas rip the tartan off a pleck and plith!”

“Right.”

Well, as you can imagine, things got worse before they got better.  Turns out the CIA  doesn’t like it when you take their patients out to get laid.  Turns out they’re tight with the police, too.  The upshot was:  I couldn’t spend any more time with Robert – which is upsetting because he had so many important things to tell me.  And the other thing, of course, was that I got arrested again.  When it came up for trial, they weren’t so lenient with the so-called kidnapping as they’d been with my egg-bombing episode.  I got public service again, only this time I had to work with seniors at an Alzheimer’s unit.  They don’t have so much to say – not like the aphasic priests.

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1. Jack the Giant Killer

Please don’t laugh, I entertain a fantasy.  It’s not a fantasy really.  One thinks of fantasy as an expression of hope or desire, whereas the scenario which plays itself out in my brain is an expression of fear.  Please don’t laugh, I worry that one day Leonard Cohen will seduce my wife.  He’ll speak to her with that golden voice and call her his sister of mercy and set his hands between her thighs and move on from there.  Suzanne will find herself overwhelmed by his larger-than-life persona, and will surrender her perfect body to his wandering tongue.  In my fantasy, I’m looking on the scene from the other side of a window and I am helpless to do anything about it.  I feel insignificant and powerless.  For her part, Suzanne grows and grows so that by the time she achieves orgasm she’s as big as a house and I’m no more than an ant scrabbling at her foundation.

You can imagine my consternation then, when on a Friday afternoon I called Suzanne on my way home from work to ask if there were any groceries I should pick up and she advised me that Leonard Cohen was sitting in our living room.  I tried to keep my voice steady as I said:  “That’s nice, honey,” but I’m sure she could hear the quaver.

I’ve never been able to get from Suzanne the precise details of how Leonard Cohen ended up in our living room.  It’s not as if we move in the same circles.  There he is, a man of international reputation, who has devoted his life to filling the hole in our culture.  And there I am, a guy nobody’s ever heard of, who trades in secured instruments for a bank.  I even look like I trade in secured instruments for a bank – with my blue blazers and striped ties and male pattern baldness.  I don’t have a poetic bone in my body, though I secretly play the guitar, but only when the house is empty.  Suzanne doesn’t even know.

Notwithstanding my lack of ties to the arts community, there sat Leonard Cohen in my living room, sipping on a G & T with my Suzanne and talking to her in that gravelly voice of his. Suzanne greeted me at the front door with a peck on the cheek.  I whispered: “What the hell is he doing here?”  But she shushed me and led me by the hand into the living room.  She felt my raw jealousy and met it with a look of annoyance – a subtle twist from the corner of her mouth.  “Leonard,” she said, “I’d like you to meet my husband, David.  David, this is Leonard.”

He rose from his seat to shake my hand.  No.  That makes it sound too smooth, as if his movements were invested with a natural grace.  In fact, he heaved himself forward and thrust with his arms; he grunted and wheezed and groaned; and when at last he took hold of my hand, he let a grimace fall across his face.  He gave a contorted smile and made a comment about aching in the places where he used to play.  From the photos I had seen, I assumed Leonard (“Can I call you Leonard?  Lenny?”) was a tall man with lanky limbs, and he may well have been such a man in his younger days, but the man before me now was older and stooped and worn out.  He had a two or three day growth of grizzle on his face that was grey and seedy, and a trace of spittle had dried in the crease of skin where his jowl began.  I noticed, too, that he smelled.  It was the smell of somebody who hasn’t bathed or changed his clothes in several days – not as pungent as the smell of riding on a subway car with a street person in mid-July – but it was a smell of the same order.

“Leonard was just telling me how he was in Vermont and drove up to Montreal for a reading last night, but had to be in T.O. this morning, so after closing time, he started to drive but couldn’t keep his eyes open, so he pulled off the highway and slept in his car ‘til dawn, then finished the trip this morning.”

By the time she was done with Leonard’s triptych, Suzanne was breathless and beautiful.  When she drew in a fresh lungful of air, her breasts rose like the swell of a rising tide.  She wore a low-cut V-neck sweater, and a strand of her hair had fallen into the cleavage.  I watched her breasts rise and fall.  I wanted to touch them.  I wanted to kiss them.  Suzanne sometimes accused me of having a breast fetish.  I would laugh and answer that I was no different than any other straight man on the planet (which raises an interesting semantic question:  if everybody does it, is it really a fetish?)  Leonard looked up at her and smiled.  He was sitting in a wide armchair and Suzanne had settled herself on the left arm so that her buttock brushed against his elbow and her nipples hovered at the level of his eyes.  I wanted to pull her sweater up and over her head and lay her down on the Persian carpet and take her there on the living room floor while Leonard watched.

Something must have shown on my face because Suzanne caught it and asked what I was thinking.

“Nothing,” but I wasn’t convincing.

“Oh, come on.”

I would have to improvise.  “I was wondering if you’ve invited our guest to stay for dinner.”

Leonard raised his hands in a defensive posture, saying “No, no, no” and inadvertently(?) brushing the back of his left hand past Suzanne’s right nipple.  “I couldn’t possibly impose.”

You already have, I thought to myself, but said aloud:  “Not at all.  Not at all.”

Suzanne slid from the arm of the chair and crossed the living room to the door that led to the kitchen.  There, she paused and turned and called me to join her.  I excused myself and hoped Leonard would overlook the erection that was beginning to press itself against the cloth of my grey trousers.  If Leonard had overlooked it, Suzanne certainly hadn’t.  She nestled up to me and pressed against the bulge in my trousers and wondered if that was for her.

“Well, it sure as hell isn’t for him.  That much I know.”

Suzanne screwed her face into a wry smile and asked how I could be so certain of my desires.

“Jesus!” and I rolled my eyes.

While Suzanne got the wok heated and slid all the ingredients for a stir fry into the hot bowl, I set out three plates on the dining room table along with chop sticks and wine glasses.  Leonard had finished his G & T and was floating amiably above his chair now, so I opened a passable bottle of pinot noir, but not our best, since I wasn’t yet certain I cared for our guest.  I felt myself suspended somewhere amongst all the sounds:  the sizzle of hot vegetables and the pop of a cork and the unabashed bubbles of Leonard’s farts.

Leonard cleared his throat and when I turned to face him, he smiled and said, almost as if he had written his words somewhere before and had memorized them for just such an occasion:  “Women have been exceptionally kind in my old age.”

I tried to swallow my jealousy and speak in a magnanimous tone:  “Suzanne has a generous heart.”

Leonard held his glass of wine by the stem and twirled it ineptly.  His hands shook and a drop spilled on the lapel of his jacket.  It was then that I saw, for the first time, that this man, this seducer of women, this troubadour without a bed of his own, this gypsy lover, was now nothing more than a frail old man, with cataracts and shaking hands.  I was suddenly ashamed of my insecurity.  Maybe Leonard sensed the change in my heart.

“Did your wife tell you how I ended up here?”

“You’d been driving from Montreal?

He smiled.  “I had to pee.”

“You had to pee?  That’s how you ended up here?  I don’t quite see the connection.”

“It’s a prostate thing.”  He shifted in the arm chair.  “I knew I wasn’t gonna make it and happened to be driving through your neighbourhood, so I chose a house at random.”

“A house at random,” I said in an abstract way.  “That’s funny.  A house at random.”

“We’re almost ready,” Suzanne called from the kitchen.

I pointed to the table in the dinning room.  “Why don’t we sit down with our glasses and …”

Leonard sloshed a few more drams of his wine on the toe of his left shoe as he hoisted himself to his feet.  He stretched and yawned and it was obvious he had shrunk since the days when he first bought his jacket.  I expect there was once a time when he could almost have touched the ceiling, but now his shoulders were hunched and drawn up around his ears.  The jacket hung loose from his shoulders like the stole of an apostate priest.  He slunked into the dining room and struggled to pull out the chair I had shown him.  It was even more of a struggle for him to slide the chair in close to the table.  Throughout the meal, bits of zucchini and snow pea slid from between his chop sticks and either fell into his lap or slopped onto the floor by his feet.

Suzanne took her place across from me and smiled a brilliant smile that warmed me almost as much as the wine.  I don’t remember much of the conversation, though I suspect it was smart and snappy.  What I do remember is that Suzanne was sparkling and attentive, beaming across the table and passing me secret looks and grinning furtively whenever Leonard had bowed his head to examine the food on his plate.  So it didn’t really come as a surprise when I felt a foot in my crotch.  I started, of course; I’ve always found it difficult to relax at first when someone else is playing in the parts where I’m afraid to ache.  But the toes moved with an exquisite gentleness and I had grown relaxed enough to be anything but relaxed.  Suzanne gave me a sly smile and I knew that later in the evening the two of us would have a wonderful time on the Persian carpet in the living room.

By the time we had emptied our plates, I was boasting a painful erection that threatened to poke a hole through my trousers.  I was worried Suzanne might ask me to clear the plates, so I prepared myself to deliver a long list of excuses.  But my concern never came up.  Suzanne pushed back her chair and gathered up the plates and carted them off to the kitchen.  For a minute, I thought nothing of the fact that there was still a foot in my crotch gentling drawing me on to dessert.  I looked at Leonard who was wiping a few grains of sticky rice from the corner of his mouth.  He smiled at me but said nothing.  I looked down to my lap and saw there a large foot in a black dress sock.  There was a hole in the sock and a big toe sticking through it, and a tuft of hair growing from just above the first joint.  Although I knew the foot could belong to only one person, nevertheless, I stared at it as if it was a disembodied foot with a will all its own.  I was certain that if I looked under the table, I’d see both of Leonard’s legs folded genteelly beneath his chair, one whole, the other, footless.

By the time Suzanne had returned, the foot was back where it belonged.  Leonard and I exchanged glances once, then we continued as if nothing had happened.  After dinner and a dessert wine, Leonard took his leave.  He had never intended to be such an imposition, he said.  All he had ever hoped for when he pulled into our driveway was the chance to relieve his ever-shrinking bladder in a washroom that was clean.  He was grateful for our hospitality.  “The world’s a little colder than the one that I was born into,” he said.  “It’s good to know that not everyone has hardened on me.”

“Ahhhh,” Suzanne said in her most sentimental voice, and she gave him a peck on his rough cheek.

As Leonard Cohen stepped down the front walk to the driveway, Suzanne called after him:  “Look at me, Leonard.  Look at me one last time.”

Leonard turned and waved, and precisely at that instant, a flash went off and blinded him.  Suzanne had snapped a photo of him.  Later that evening, she printed it off and trimmed it to a nice size and tucked it in the corner of the mirror above our mantel in the living room.  Still later that evening, after we each had finished another glass of the pinot noir, we found ourselves naked on the Persian carpet, playing in the places where Leonard ached, while he looked down on us through jealous eyes.

Dec. 23, 2008

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1. The Incredible Shrinking Zombie

When Youssef was done, he emerged naked from the tent carrying a clay pitcher of water in one hand and his robe draped over the opposite arm.  He took a long draught from the pitcher, letting the water spill from the sides of his mouth and down his neck and chest and legs, and dribbling it in pools around his feet where it disappeared into the sand.  He let out a satisfied “Ahhh” and threw himself onto the ground beneath the rock’s shade.

“Mohammed,” he said.  He snatched the stick from his brother and snapped it in two, then threw both halves at the vulture.  The vulture hopped back two paces, then inched forward to its original perch.

“Mohammed, how long has it been since you deflowered your seventy-second?”

Mohammed did some reckoning in his head, and then he did some more with his fingers.  “At least fifteen hundred years.”

“Don’t you miss it?”

Mohammed yawned.

Youssef laughed and poked at his brother with a dirty finger.  “Do you still remember that day long ago when you achieved your immortality?”

Sometimes it was a pleasure to while away a year or two reminiscing about the old days.  They remembered how they had given their lives for the faith.  Youssef had boarded a bus in Haifa with C-4 strapped to his chest and a dead-man’s switch in his left hand.  He hadn’t shaved for days just so he could sport the wild-eyed fanatical look that seemed to be part of the job description.  In fact, he wasn’t much of a wild-eyed fanatic; he was more of a mamma’s boy who was enrolled at a good university and liked to play RPG’s with all his online friends.  For his part Mohammed had worn a knapsack into a marketplace on a Friday morning where he detonated a nail bomb.

Youssef laughed.  “I remember, brother, when your head flew off.  It landed in a stack of watermelons.”  He slapped his thigh and wiped a tear from his eye.  “And your testicles!  Why, they were lost in a bin of peaches.”

“But this virgin business!” said Mohammed.

“Yes?”

“This virgin business.  It’s not everything I would have expected.”

“You speak the truth, my brother.”

“After a few thousand years, it gets tiresome.”

Youssef said nothing in return.  Instead, they listened to the warm breeze sweeping across the sand.

“They start out knowing nothing, and they’re more afraid than eager.  With the first two or three, you think:

‘What an opportunity!  I can teach them to please me in just the way I want.’  But it’s no good.”

“No.”  And Youssef shook his head in agreement.

“Because sometimes I want inventiveness, spontaneity.  Sometimes I wish we’d gotten seventy-two old whores instead.”

“Mohammed!  You’re treading close to blasphemy.”

But Mohammed was animated and didn’t hear his brother.  “And then they get ideas!”

“Ideas.”  Youssef knew exactly what his brother meant.

If you spent a century or two deflowering one of your virgins, it gave the other seventy-one time to talk amongst themselves and to read authors like Gloria Steinem and Nadine Gordimer.  They started to make demands.  They started to say things like:  “I’m a person too, and my pleasure counts for something.”  If one of the virgins spoke to you in that way, and if you raised a hand to strike her so that she would know her proper place, then the other seventy-one would rise up to defend her and they would tear you to shreds.  There is nothing more pernicious, either in this world or in the one before, than seventy-two angry virgins.

“It would be better to pay them and be done with it.”

Youssef nodded.  “I’m inclined to agree with you my brother.”

A man was approaching, still far off on the desert road.  Mohammed noticed first.  He squinted and pointed to the horizon.  “It’s reverend Jerry!” he shouted.

At first, just a shimmering speck on the hot sand, the man’s features grew more distinct as he approached.  On Earth, he had been a portly man with fat pinkish cheeks and perfect hair, but all that had changed in the afterlife.  With so much time at his disposal, the reverend Jerry had undertaken a vigorous exercise program.  He liked to go on long walks.  One of his more legendary strolls had taken almost a millennium.  And because he loved to walk in the full glare of the heavenly light, his hair was bleached and his face was a leathery brown, with crow’s feet around the eyes that came from squinting down desert roads.

Youssef poked at his brother.  “It could be worse.  We could have suffered his reward.”

Mohammed grinned and nodded.

For the reverend Jerry, the afterlife had demanded many adjustments.  He had risen to the challenge of a porcine build in a desert clime, but he had struggled with the more troublesome fact that the “Sons of Righteousness” (as the club was called) included men with names like Mohamed and Youssef.  But most difficult of all was a little revelation delivered by an Angel of the Lord.  It was in the early days when the reverend Jerry had first arrived.  He had set out on a desert road, trying to get his bearings, and an Angel of the Lord had offered to show him a good time.  With the light high overhead and beating down on Jerry’s still pinky flesh, the Angel had said unto him:

“Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.  We really need to have a talk about your sexuality.”

That was when the Angel of the Lord revealed to the reverend Jerry that, right from the get-go, right from the moment his daddy’s sperm fertilized his mommy’s ovum, the Lord God Almighty of Heaven and Earth had ordained that the reverend Jerry should have a preference for men.  But Jerry had turned his back on the Lord’s divine plan by sublimating his desires through an aggressive pursuit of religion and an unnatural love of food.  Even in the afterlife, Jerry had continued his sublimating ways.  The Lord had rewarded him with seventy-two virgins all his own (since, in his own way, he had been a terrorist of the first rank).  They were fresh-faced young men who were eager to please.  But Jerry would have none of it.  Instead, he poured himself into his exercise regime, and as aeons passed, he developed rippling abs and a tight ass, but that seemed only to make things worse.  He had tried to raid Mohammed’s and Youssef’s stables, but the women had only twittered and sent him on his way.

So the reverend Jerry had consigned himself to wander the desert sands.  He had become hard and lean.  And so it had gone on for nearly a thousand thousand years, and still he hadn’t managed to himself laid.

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“Absolutely the most pathetic sight you ever saw,” says Ray, and I can well imagine it seein’ as Thelma always looks a little bewildered even at the best of times.  “Funny thing, too,” Ray said, “how she didn’t shed a tear.”  Some people will practically drown themselves in a river of tears, but not our Thelma.  Her eyes just kept as dry as dry can be.

It came as a surprise, then, to see Thelma start cleaning out the house so soon afterwards.  In fact, I’m feeling a little guilty about it, pulling into our driveway after being on the road all day and well into the evening, and even as tired as we were, noticing how there was a D27 dehumidifier (the Desiccator) sitting at the end of Thelma’s drive waiting for the garbage collection, and thinking what a shame to throw out something practically brand new, and taking it inside even before we unpacked all our other things.  It was only afterwards Ray came over and told us how Ed had died while we were away, and so we were feeling a bit peevish for having taken Thelma’s D27 Desiccator.  It kind of felt like we were taking advantage of another person’s misfortunes.

Well it makes you stop and really have yourself a think when you hear how someone practically your own age has gone and died all of a sudden.  For a while there, Norm and I wondered what it might’ve been that Ed died of, but seein’ as we didn’t really know, Norm moved on to talking about the D27 Desiccator.  According to Norm, it was a top of the line model, just the very thing we needed to suck the moisture out of stuff.  It’s always been so damp and mildewy in the basement.  You can’t ever really store old clothes or books down there on account of the spots that grow on the fabric and the paper, and it sure is useless tryna dry clothes on a rack down there.  Come back even a week later and they’re still damp, only now they smell.  So Norm was just raving about the machine, calling it a marvel of modern engineering, so efficient it’d such water from a chunk of granite.

Norm plugged in the dehumidifier and got it going.  “Works just tickety-boo,” he said, and we wondered why Thelma’d wanted to get rid of a perfectly good D27 Desiccator.  We felt guilty for a bit, then got to work washing dirty laundry from the trip.  While the laundry was going, Norm did the lawn and I went across the road to pay my respects and to drop off a bunch of single serving lasagnas I’d thrown together.

Poor Thelma!  She didn’t talk much, and none at all about her Ed, how he was dead, or even the circumstances of his dying.  I tried to get her to talk about how Ed died, partly because I was curious but partly too because they say it’s good to talk things through.  But all Thelma could say about it was that it was too horrible to tell.  Mostly she just sat there in the front room staring out the window sometimes muttering something about needing to wash dishes or sometimes humming a snatch from a favourite song that maybe she and Ed had once heard on the radio years before.  I’m not always patient about such things.  I tried my best to bide the silences between her random comments and old songs, but pretty soon my patience had all dried up and I was itching to get back across the road to finish cleaning after our vacation.

When I’d left for Thelma’s, Norm had been cutting the lawn, but when I came back, Norm wasn’t outside anymore.  Going inside, I called his name again and again but there was no answer.  Norm’s funny that way, getting preoccupied with one thing and another and wandering off.  I’ve always suspected he’s a little bit ADHD – always starting something, then getting distracted when he’s halfway through.  Well, I couldn’t find Norm anywhere, so I went downstairs to hang up another load of laundry.  I filled up the basket with Norm’s old underwear and work shirts, then set out another clothes rack by the new dehumidifier.  That’s when I noticed – there on the floor by the D27 Desiccator – a mound of dust or ashes or grit or something – just a dried up old heap of dirt.  “Damn!” I thought to myself, “but it’s well nigh impossible to keep a house clean with Norm living in it.  He’s been here tinkering with the dehumidifier again and left himself a pile of dirt.”

I went and pulled out the broom and dustpan and set to cleaning up Norm’s little mess.  I had to kneel to get at all the bits of grit, and there, closer to the concrete floor, light from the window well came in at just the right angle and caught the glint of something nestled in the dirt.  I brushed away some of the flecks, maybe the way an archeologist might clean up around an excavation, and there, plopped in the middle of the mound was Norm’s wedding ring.  “Damn it, Norm!” I muttered.  The man would lose his own head if it weren’t firmly attached to his neck.  I picked up the ring and stuffed it in my pocket for safekeeping, but when I did that, the motion shuffled around some of the dirt.  There, underneath the first layer, was another glint of gold, something maybe the same size as the end of my pinky.  I held it to the light for a closer look.  Why, it was Norm’s gold tooth.  “Norm!” I shouted.  “What have you gone and done?”  I scattered the dust some more and found other bits of metal – the rims of his reading glasses, his silver belt buckle, a few coins that he liked to clink around in his left pocket, the car keys.  “Norm!” I screamed.  It was just a heap of Norm, there by the D27 Desiccator.

After that and for the next few days things went by in a blur, just the way Ray said they would.  There was the police and the ambulance and the fire truck.  There was making arrangements and phoning family and friends.  There was making sure bills kept getting paid.  So when I finally stopped to take stock of things, it seemed like everything had whizzed by in a dream.  With a moment to reflect, the very first thing it struck me to do was to throw out the D27 Desiccator.  So I called up Ray and had him help me carry it to the end of the driveway, which we did a couple days before garbage pick up.  No sooner had I stepped back inside than I noticed how a neighbour in the next block over had pulled up with his van and was loading the dehumidifier into the back.  I wanted to cry, but I just couldn’t.  There was nothing left for tears.

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1. John Henry

Beth an’ me, we had a real good argument when I first brought home the sofa. She said it was too big. Well then I managed to squeeze it into the den. So she said it was ugly. Well that’s just plain untrue. I’ve got a thousand or more years of Scotland to back me up on that one. Besides which plaid is soothin’ – ‘cept maybe to look at when you’ve got a hangover. But otherwise it’s about as nice a thing to rest your eyes on as you could ever hope to see if you’re not countin’ Budweiser cans.

A couple weeks later she’s talkin’ to Nancy O’Neill from two streets over and Nancy’s talking about how they’re havin’ some renos done, how they had to move some furniture out onto the front lawn while they were doing some work, and how later that same day they turned around and found someone’d up and pinched their sofa. Well, I had a laugh ‘bout that one too. Beth went on ‘bout how I should be ‘fessin’ up, just tell them I thought it was out for the garbage pickup (which is the truth) and would never’ve taken the damn thing if I thought they’d still wanted it. But like someone or t’other says: possession is nine tenths of the law. Seems I can snooze easy enough on the sofa, so it must be true. I’d never be able to sleep easy on a sofa that wasn’t really mine. Beth – god bless her – she’ll never rat me out. Says it’s my responsibility. Says it’s up to me whether or not I sleep nights with an easy conscience. Still, as big-hearted as she makes herself out to be, she scowls at me whenever she passes the door to the den and sees me stretched out on the sofa clickin’ my remote.

So there I am, togglin’ between Maury and Springer when I find myself driftin’ off. Can’t say as I recollect quite what passed through my head as I slipped into la la land. Probably some combination of Jerry Springer and tartans because I dreamed I was standin’ there in a kilt while some piece of white trash accused me of fatherin’ her baby. A fight broke out an’ I guess I must’ve given the studio audience a view of somethin’ precious under my kilt because I wake up with a start, feelin’ a rush of wind up my crotch. Sunlight’s blarin’ down on my face, which is odd seein’ as I can’t remember it ever bein’ so bright in the den. An’ there’s the roar of traffic all around me. I sit bolt straight an’ look all around me. Holy cripes! There’s a transport truck bearin’ down on me with horns blarin’ an’ a big ugly bulldog grinnin’ at me from the grill.

Here I am sittin’ on my sofa in the middle of twelve lanes of highway traffic. I have barely enough time to get my bearings, then I roll off the sofa and scrabble my way to the median. As soon as I reach the concrete barrier, I hear a whump. I turn around in time to see the transport truck smash the sofa into a million little bits, with stuffin’ flyin’ up practically as high as the light standards, an’ springs sproingin’, an’ fabric shredded. I can’t believe what’s happened. Even when I try to explain it to the cops when they show up in their cruisers, I’m still havin’ trouble believin’ I coulda lost such a fine sofa when it seems like only minutes before, me an’ my sofa were mindin’ our own business back in my den plunked in fronta the TV set. I have no notion how I ended up in the middle of twelve lanes of traffic. Maybe it was a prank or a hoax or revenge, or maybe some weird sleep thing, or another dimension, or an alien abduction, or an alternate universe where everything looks the same ‘cept for transport trucks runnin’ through your livin’ room.

But I don’t suppose losin’ my sofa’s the worst of it. There I am, sittin’ on the median, watchin’ my sofa get hammered to bits, when I see a glint on the pavement just off to the side. I look over and see that it’s the plastic casing of my TV remote. So I hop off the median when there’s a break in the traffic and step out to get back at least somethin’ of mine. But just as I lean down to pick up the remote, I hear a horn blarin’ an’ I hear tires squealin’ an’ I look up just as a car swerves towards me. So I jump outta the way just in time. The car runs over my remote and smashes it into another million bits.

So now, not only can’t I lie down on my sofa, but I can’t change the channel no more neither.

No related posts.

There was once a time when we had such hopes for the man. It was nearly ten years ago now that he made the announcement. “I’m goin’ clean,” he said. Even the papers picked it up. Front page news: “Sarducci runs a new game.” He gave us the feeling that anything was possible.

Tony Sarducci grew up in Chicago. He could’ve been some kinda mathematical genius and gone to MIT or done code-breaking at Fort Langley. He had a gift for numbers, an instinct for probability. They say he could count cards ten decks deep, which led to a defining moment in the Uptown Casino. They caught him counting cards and wanted to know his secret. He said it was a natural gift. They didn’t believe him, so they broke his right pinky and banned him for life. He was a young man then and he took it hard.

Tony Sarducci started as a small time bookmaker in the back alleys of Chicago and it seems only a blink of the eye before he owned a hotel and casino on the strip in Vegas. There was his famous motto: God really does play dice. That might strike you as kinda cutsie-pie, but Tony Sarducci meant it. He had a philosophical bent that was surprising given his fondness for crowbars to the kneecaps and cinderblocks chained to feet. Years later, I had a chance to interview two of his associates, Harry the Weasel and Fat Boy Vincenzo, and they told how late at night if he took a shine to you, he’d invite you into the VIP lounge for a private party, and after a few drinks, he’d be quoting Wittgenstein and going on about statistical heuristic structures and other shit like that. You could tell his heart was somewheres else.

Even so, there was a practical side to the man and the practical side knew the value of diversity. By the time Tony Sarducci had renounced it all, he had accumulated an awful lot to renounce. Apart from the casino, there was the extortion, fraud and racketeering operations, the drugs and money-laundering, the prostitution and porn rings. We could never tie him to any of it, of course, but our forensic accountants knew it was there. It had to be. Tony Sarducci would’ve respected their opinion. “The numbers don’t lie,” they said. And he knew it.

And then Tony Sarducci walked away from it all. Some say he was too smart for the racket and just got bored. Others say he realized he was becoming too successful and it was making him look conspicuous. I have a different theory. I think he did it for his niece, Rosina.

Rosina Sarducci was a remarkable young woman who had about her a moral clarity that made you feel inclined to judge yourself unkindly when you were in her presence. I met her once during the investigation and she was beautiful. I don’t mean that she had a great body (though that was certainly true) and I don’t mean that she had radiant milky white skin (though I found myself stammering like a fool when I asked her questions); what I mean is that there was something about her, an aura, an electricity; it made me wanna be a priest just so’s I could hear her confession.

Rosina Sarducci volunteered at the Ninth Street Mission and her uncle came to visit her one day. It must’ve been a shock for him, flying in from the opulence of Vegas to see his own niece in the middle of such squalor. She had a one-bedroom apartment with roaches and mice. He must’ve said: “I don’t get it. You’re a Sarducci. Volunteer at the mission if you like, but at least let me set you up like a Sarducci.” He said this to her in a low voice as they stood together in the common room of the mission. There was a TV set stuck in the corner and a bunch of clients watching the Bulls battle it out against the Nicks.

Rosina pointed to the TV and asked: “What numbers are you runnin’ on the Bulls today?”

“What’s that gotta do with anything?”

“Humour me.”

Tony Sarducci must’ve thought his niece was a bit off but we’re all inclined to make allowances for a beautiful woman, even one who thinks so little of herself that she’d volunteer at a mission. So Tony Sarducci told her the spread.

“Now look at them.” She pointed to the clients sitting in a half circle around the TV set. “Which of them do you think is most into the game?”

Tony Sarducci looked at the odd assortment of people – not exactly the kind he’d invite to the VIP lounge on a Saturday night. There was the old lady with no teeth who hummed to herself while she swayed back and forth, and there was a younger man who was grizzled and had eyes that looked in two different directions. Tony Sarducci settled on a third, a man wearing a toque and sweats who was hunched over and staring at the screen.

“Him.”

“That’s Roger.” She tapped the man on the shoulder. “How much you got riding on the game, Roger?”

“Oh hi Miss Rosina. Just two bits. S’all I got.”

She was trying to make a point. She was trying to tell her uncle that the people most involved in the game were the ones who had a stake in the outcome. It was the same for social activists. “Do you think Rosa Parks could’ve made any difference if she was white? And Woody Guthrie. You think he could’ve written protest songs if he owned a shipping yard? In my own small way, it’s the same. I wanna change the world, Uncle Tony. I wanna make a difference. How could I do what I do if I went home at night to a bubble bath an’ a glass of wine? How could I live with myself?”

I myself have stared into those beautiful green eyes, and I can imagine how Tony must’ve felt, standing in that bare room, with those broken people, shamed by his niece’s beautiful green eyes. Something happened. His heart thawed. Some people think he didn’t get the point. He may have been a hotshot when it came to numbers, but he was dense as a lead pipe when it came to life lessons. But he must’ve got something from his talk with Rosina because he walked away from it all. Some people take a cynical view and think alls he did was substitute one racket for another. I’m not so sure. I think, at least at the beginning, he really wanted to change. He really wanted to make a difference. But the old Tony was lurking there in the shadows.

Tony went legit. Remember his tagline? “Every one of youse has got a winning ticket in the lottery of life, only some of youse forgot to check da numbers.” Remember that? He said it on a thirty second spot. When our organized crime unit in Arlington saw that ad of his, you shoulda seen the eyes roll. We all figured he was up to something, so up went the twenty-four hour surveillance and the wiretaps. But he was clean. Then came our next theory: the crazy card. We figured he’d gone nuts. But our profilers couldn’t see it. He seemed so normal apart from his whacked out TV ads. In the end, we realized that Tony Sarducci really did wanna make a difference. I guess his niece had gotten to him.

Tony Sarducci decided to start small. He was gonna bring an end to the war in Iraq. He made his contacts, did his research, set the odds and then started a pool. At first, people laughed at him, but I guess ridicule is the price you pay for genius. When people saw how sincere he was and when they heard that the money was being handled by a big accounting firm and was earmarked for reconstruction, they started to warm to the idea. He hit a critical mass when he booked his ten millionth bet. There were billions of dollars on the table, and people wanted their winnings sooner than later. Pressure on the government was unbearable and within months, they’d pulled out the troops. Without the Americans, the Brits felt silly, so they ate the last of their crumpets and sailed home.

It wasn’t just the money. Pundits were quick to realize that the decisive factor was public engagement. Most people weren’t willing to lay down money without learning a little about the issues. They started educating themselves. They started learning about other countries and about their own country’s foreign policies. They learned new words like “waterboarding” and collateral damage.” Pretty soon, they were paying as much attention to the evening news as they used to pay to a Pistons game.

That’s not to say that Tony Sarducci didn’t have his detractors, but when he pulled off a repeat performance with Darfur, people were already beginning to talk about a Congressional Medal of Honor. By the time Tony started making odds on the Congo, he was booking a hundred million plus bets per armed conflict. Tony had become an international player, the first private individual in history to dictate terms to China’s communist party. Soon, China and Taiwan were on friendly terms, and Korea’s 38th parallel had become the site of a math competition in Tony’s honour. Mexicans flowed freely back and forth across the U.S. border. Israelis fasted on Ramadan and Palestinians brought presents to Bar Mitzvahs. Even Canada’s Québecois benefitted; they were no longer afraid to shop in the West Edmonton Mall. But Tony’s reach went beyond armed conflicts. Within five years, scientists had discovered a cure for HIV/AIDS and every child in sub-Saharan Africa had the antidote. Poverty was a thing of the past and the last factory to spew toxic waste had closed its doors. Clean energy was freely available, and people were lying on beaches without fear of cancer or global warming. Only one thing remained: the activist’s holy grail: world peace.

The odds favoured New Year’s Day. You probably remember it. I don’t think there was a person on the planet who didn’t feel that optimistic lurch in their gut. There were two handguns left – in Tibet of all places. Once we nabbed the rebel monks and whisked their arms to Mt. St. Helen’s for a ceremonial flinging into the crater, it would be official. Only it never turned out that way. As the ball dropped in Times Square, violence erupted in Spain.

That’s when I received an anonymous tip that the fix was in. I threw together our old team and we started investigating. Police had arrested an alleged instigator – a man who claimed to be an activist advocating for the rights of tomatoes at La Tomatina and was holding farmers hostage. I pulled the photos from Interpol and recognized Harry the Weasel. We all made the connection instantly.

Seems our Tony Sarducci couldn’t resist the temptation. The numbers were just too big. Through a shell company, he put everything he had on January second. So when the monks agreed to give up their handguns a day early, he panicked and called in a marker from Harry the Weasel.

When I made the arrest, things got pretty wild. Even though it was Tony who’d messed up all on his own, to a lot of people, he was still the big hero, and they took it out on me. They didn’t wanna believe that this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was just another low-life skunk. So there I was with my tires slashed and rocks through my front window, and email death threats. It was pretty clear that our chance at world peace had just gone up in smoke. Things got bad everywhere. China and Taiwan had a trade dispute, guns went off in the Congo again, Big Pharma raised the price of its antidote, America told the foreigners to go back where they came from.

I don’t understand it. We were so close. I dunno. Maybe right from the start there was just something wrong with Tony’s approach.

No related posts.

The minute Sven Svensen stepped from the company jet at La Guardia, he could feel the electricity. He was on a tight schedule, so the limo drove him straight to the convention center. The driver was a dark-haired man who looked a bit rough around the edges. The man gripped the steering wheel with tobacco-stained fingers and when he spoke to Sven, his words were gruff and slurred.

Sven was there to deliver the keynote address at an industry convention. He was even going to upstage Steve Jobs, though out of deference to Apple’s marketing savvy, Sven had carefully studied each of Apple’s product launches and had paid careful attention to Mr. Jobs’ personal style. The lesson was obvious: stay positive; don’t open by trashing the competition; let your superior product do that for you.

“Hello, New York!” Hands up, waving to the crowds, smiling in the glare of the lights.

People were chanting: “Yes, Yes, Yes.” Or was it “Sven, Sven, Sven?” It was hard to tell in such a cavernous room.

“I’m Sven Svensen, CEO of Yeskia.” Cheers rose from the back of the room and cascaded down to the front. It was like an ABBA concert.

“We have something exciting for you today!” Sven wouldn’t have to do anything to win this crowd; they were already his. “Today I want you to walk away from this convention with one word on your lips. Just one word. Convergence!”

Sven scanned the room and tried to make eye contact with as many people as possible. He estimated that there were somewhere between two and three thousand people present for the keynote address.

“Convergence! Y’ know – ” and he hitched his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans in a kind of homespun folksiness that appealed to the Americans “ – y’ know, for years now, there’s been a lot of talk about convergence. You have your cell phone. Then you add a camera. And a camcorder. And an mp3 player. And a browser with wi-fi connection. And then, pretty soon, do you know what convergence starts to mean? Convergence starts to mean compromise. To make it affordable, you skimp on the camera lens and so your images are blurry. You skimp on memory and so you can take only twenty seconds of video. You skimp on your audio technology and then your music sounds like its coming from a tin can. You can get yourself a connection, but your browser looks like a postage stamp – ya, what the hell is a postage stamp? – and you have to visit your ophthalmologist every month for eyestrain.

“Well, not anymore. At Yeskia, we’re committed to real convergence. Not convergence of compromise. Convergence of excellence.

“Y’ know, folks, ever since the earliest days of Yeskia, our company’s tagline has been: “Think dufferent.” It could have been “Think different” but then we’d be just like everybody else. Our new product line all began one afternoon when we applied the company tagline to a problem. We asked ourselves: “How can we think dufferent?” And from that simple question, an answer emerged. You see, we’d been trying to use our conventional cell phones to carry on a conference call, but we needed media applications too, and – well – between poor image quality and poorer sound quality and dropped connections – well – we all agreed that we needed something better than this. So we began to think dufferent and pretty soon the answer came to us.

“It was something really simple. And isn’t that the way it always is with really good ideas? It was something really simple. What we realized – the sudden insight, the amazing epiphany, the bolt of lightening to the head – was that we were thinking like Swedes. Silly us! We assume that because the cell phone has 99% saturation in the Swedish market, that we should use the cell phone as the platform for our converging technologies. But that’s not the situation in other markets. What about – well – what about America? The fact is: the cell phone isn’t so popular in America. I know. I know. It’s difficult to believe. But in America there are still people who don’t have cell phones: the homeless, for instance, and the more than two million people in American prisons, and some members of Congress.

“So we asked ourselves a question. If we think dufferent about the matter, is there anything in America more popular than the cell phone that we could use as a platform for converging technologies? The answer was obvious. We all know that every American loves his handgun. Market saturation is more than 99%. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Yeskia 9mm.”

Sven pulled a shiny object from a holster and held it high overhead. There was a crash of cymbals and the lights dimmed; orchestral music swelled like a sea-tide of epic change; fog machines filled the stage; spotlights picked out the upheld hand and mixed with the fog to produce an other-worldly effect; giant images appeared behind Sven showing a Client Eastwood look-alike in poncho, dressed as a tough-jawed corporate executive and speaking in menacing tones on his Yeskia 9mm: “But being as this is a 9mm Yeskia, the most powerful cell phone in the world, and would blow your stock sky high with a single call, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya punk?”

A crowd can be a fickle beast. Sven knew from the moment he began that the crowd was with him. But if he couldn’t deliver on his promises, the crowd could turn – a complete reversal in the course of a half-hour presentation. What he needed now was that elusive “Wow!” factor. Time for a demonstration. The lights rose and Sven gave a quick run-down of the specs:

“The Yeskia 9mm has everything! We’ve thought of absolutely everything. Hell, you can even use it as a pregnancy test kit. It’s modeled on the Glock handgun with ceramic body and rubber grip. The major modification is a small scope which improves accuracy and doubles as the viewfinder for digicam and video. Camera has 10X optical zoom and shoots at 8 megapixels. Camcorder shoots Hi-Def RAW video and writes to a one terabyte removable memory device. Yes. You heard what I said. A one terabyte memory card. Awesome! The scope also detects infrared, so you can see live bodies through walls and it comes with night vision too.”

Sven pointed the scope around the room while the image was thrown to the big screens behind him. He zoomed in on a man picking his nose and he gave everybody a good view of a woman’s tonsils when she yawned.

“Now listen to this.” Sven pressed the play button and Ace of Base blasted through the hall. “It has the speed to pump out uncompressed audio and the audio processor has a dynamic range that rivals the best names in the industry – Bose, Blaupunkt, Bang & Olufsen, Yeskia. We’re in good company.”

By now, people were out of their chairs and swaying to the music. There were cheers and even a few lighters flickering on and off. Sven could feel Yeskia’s share prices rising and it made his heart warm. “Now let me tell about the Yeskia 9mm’s cellular telephony capabilities. The big story here is coverage. Our phone will be supported by unprecedented global coverage. If you subscribe to our plan, there will no longer be such a thing as roaming charges. Doesn’t matter where you call from or where you call to, it will be treated and billed as a local call. In fact, we’re so confident about our coverage, that we’ve given every member of the McMurdo Scott Base in the Antarctic their own cell phone and free service for a year.”

The lights dimmed again and the music grew ominous. “And now for the final demonstration.” Manikins dressed as street punks moved into view. Sven pointed at the first. A laser sighting placed a red dot on the manikin’s forehead. Sven squeezed the trigger and the manikin’s head exploded. “It has everything, my friends, absolutely everything!” The crowd went wild. People stood on their chairs and whistled. Buyers were already on their phones to head office asking for bigger budgets. Industry analysts were posting stories to their corporate blogs. Media pundits were dispatching stories to the national dailies. Sven smiled at the mild riot he’d unleashed and quietly slipped off the stage.

The driver was waiting for him at the rear door. “Get me outta here, Olaf.”

The man held open the door. As Sven brushed past, he caught a whiff of Olaf’s breath. The driver reeked of alcohol.

“Olaf? Have you been drinking?”

Olaf fumbled with the keys then dropped them on the ground. As he bent down to pick them up: “No, sir.”

“Olaf?”

“Yes?”

“Give me the keys.”

Olaf looked up with a sheepish grin and handed the keys to Sven.

“We can bring cell coverage to an entire planet but we can’t find a decent driver. Get in. We’re going to La Guardia, but it looks like I’m driving.”

Sven punched in the address and studied the directions while Olaf sat in the passenger seat singing an old song and staring out the window. The driving was more hectic than Sven had anticipated. It wasn’t like Stockholm. Here, cars came at you from every direction, and people honked their horns and stuck up their middle finger and rolled down their windows and swore at one another. Sven had to swerve to avoid a man pushing a grocery cart full of old clothes and when he righted the car, Olaf gripped his stomach and vomited all over the dash. The beautiful LCD display was covered in chunks of chili dog that oozed down the screen and made it impossible to read the map. Sven pulled a silk hanky from his jacket and held it out for Olaf to wipe down the screen, but Olaf was leaning way back in his seat with eyes closed and groaning. “Olaf!” Sven was angry. But Olaf batted away the hanky. Sven wasn’t about to wipe away his driver’s puke, so at the next stoplight, he rolled down his window and asked directions to the airport. It was a woman dressed smartly in a taupe suite, but when she caught a whiff of Olaf’s mess, she held her nose and pointed vaguely to the northeast and made a veering motion to the right.

Sven continued driving in the direction the woman had pointed. On the way in from the airport, Sven hadn’t paid attention. He’d been busy reading the latest financials and making notes for next week’s annual general meeting. He hadn’t noticed all the bridges and concrete and tall buildings and billboards and taxicabs and people swarming across the streets even when the stoplights said stop. But now, trying to navigate through the streets of Manhattan, the shock of it all was overwhelming. The worst part was that it was evening now and it was getting difficult to read the street signs. Sven noticed one big green sign pointing the way to the airport, but by the time he saw it, he had missed the cutoff and went speeding in the wrong direction. He kept looking for a place to turn around, but his nerves had gotten the best of him. After all the pressure of the presentation, his adrenalin was low, and with jet lag from the trip here, he was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to settle into the cushy chair of the Yeskia jet and nod off.

With another wrong turn, Sven found himself in an even stranger landscape: tenement buildings everywhere, and vacant lots and chain link fences and graffiti and old cars abandoned by the sides of the road. Sven slowed up and rolled down his window. There was a group of young men walking towards him on the road, which struck him as odd. He told them he was looking for La Guardia. The one standing closest reached behind him and pulled a 9mm beretta, a PX4 Storm, from out of his pants. He held a wide stance and pointed it at Sven’s forehead. “Get the fuck outta da car.”

Sven held his hands in the air, then cautiously lowered his left hand to unlatch the door. Raising his left hand again, he nudged open the door with his foot, then swung sideways and planted his feet on the pavement. Another of the men pulled Sven away from the car and gave him a hard shove to the sidewalk. The one with the gun leaned down and pointed it at Olaf: “You too. Hands up and get the fuck outta da car.”

“He’s sick,” Sven said.

“Did I ask your fuckin’ opinion?”

“But he’s sick.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Somebody whacked Sven across the jaw. He dropped to his knees and felt with his tongue where a molar had come loose.

The one with the gun motioned one of the others to get in the car and push Olaf out the passenger side. It was just a kid – a pimply teenager who kept schnooking back snot and wiping his nose on the sleeve of a dirty jean jacket. “But the guy puked,” he complained. “It smells like a cat’s been dead in here for a week.”

“I don’t give a fuck. Just get ‘im out an’ get the fuckin’ car to the chop shop. Puke don’t make no difference.”

“Now look here – ”

Another whack to the head and Sven was on his knees shaking gossamer cobwebs from his brain. There was a thud. Sven looked to one side and saw Olaf hit the pavement head first. His driver was unconscious. The car sped away with all the young men who’d been walking on the road. Now it was just Sven and the man with the beretta – “to finish the job” is what they’d all been saying.

“Look, I have money.” For the first time, it occurred to Sven that the man might kill him. “Let me show you something.” Sven reached into his pocket, but before he could withdraw it, the man had cocked the gun and was pressing it sharply into Sven’s temple. Sven gulped. He could feel the perspiration running down his cheeks and dripping from his chin. “Easy. It’s just a cell phone. You know Yeskia?”

The man gave no indication one way or the other.

“Yeskia? Cell phones? From Sweden?” Sven held up the cell phone. “This is what I do. I make cell phones. This is the latest. Not even on the market yet.”

“Know what I do?” The man spoke in a cold and even tone.

Sven shook his head.

“I steal cars.” The man smiled. “And yours is the latest. Not even on the market yet.” The man let fly with the back of his hand and sent the cell phone clattering down the sidewalk. “I couldn’t give a fuck about cell phones. I steal cars. Don’t need any fuckin’ phone to steal cars.”

“But you don’t understand.”

“Oh, I understand. You’ve got the latest in your pocket and it’s worth something. But like I said: I couldn’t give a fuck. I steal cars, not phones. I know cars, not phones. I see some rich fuck drivin’ in a limo and my fingers just itch to run the prick’s head under the wheels. Just the way I am I guess. Tell you what I’ll do.”

Sven looked up the barrel, imploring.

“I’ll let you live.” The man swung hard and struck Sven full in the face. Everything went black, then Sven hit the ground.

Sven couldn’t say how long he’d lain on the sidewalk, but it was dark when he came to. He tried to stand, but the ground whirled around and his legs buckled beneath him. He fell again, splayed across Olaf’s body. There was a buzzing in his head, but what hurt the most was a throbbing in his big toe. He wondered why a stubbed toe would scream for more attention than a powerful blow to the head. Sven rolled over and propped himself up against Olaf’s broad back. From this position, he could tilt back his head and feel the cool night air. He ran his tongue over parched lips. He was thirsty. Again he tried to stand, but fell against a low brick wall as the world spun away from him like a top on a warped table.

There was the sound of Ace of Base, clear, without distortion, breaking through the night air: “Happy Nation.” Sven had set it as his ringtone. Somebody was trying to call him. There, maybe ten meters away and gleaming in the moonlight, was Sven’s Yeskia 9mm cell phone. Sven crawled to the phone, tearing a hole in the left knee of his jeans, but by the time he’d pressed it to his ear, it had gone silent.
Sven dialed 911 instead. After two rings, a woman’s voice came on: “Hello, this is emergency services for New York City. What number are you calling from?”

Sven couldn’t remember. He owned the company. He had maybe a hundred different cell phone numbers. How the hell could he be expected to remember which he was using at any given moment.

“No need to get all snarky about it. Now what’s your situation?”

Sven explained that he’d been mugged and had his car stolen, that Olaf was unconscious, that he needed police and an ambulance.

“And what is your location?”

“I don’t know. I’m from Stockholm. I was on my way to La Guardia and got lost.”

The woman must have heard the anxiety in Sven’s voice because she spoke in reassuring tones. “No problem. No problem. We’ll find you. You say you’re talking on a cell phone, right?”

“Ya.”

“So we’ll find you with GPS.”

“GPS?”

Sven rolled back against the low brick wall. GPS. Shit! They’d forgotten to load the phones with GPS.

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